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The Taiwan Voter examines the critical role ethnic and national identities play in politics, utilizing the case of Taiwan. Although elections there often raise international tensions, and have led to military demonstrations by China, no scholarly books have examined how Taiwan's voters make electoral choices in a dangerous environment. Critiquing the conventional interpretation of politics as an ideological battle between liberals and conservatives, The Taiwan Voter demonstrates in Taiwan the party system and voters' responses are shaped by one powerful determinant of national identity—the China factor.
Taiwan's electoral politics draws international scholarly interest because of the prominent role of ethnic and national identification. While in most countries the many tangled strands of competing identities are daunting for scholarly analysis, in Taiwan the cleavages are powerful and limited in number, so the logic of interrelationships among issues, partisanship, and identity are particularly clear. The Taiwan Voter unites experts to investigate the ways in which social identities, policy views, and partisan preferences intersect and influence each other. These novel findings have wide applicability to other countries, and will be of interest to a broad range of social scientists interested in identity politics.
The Open Access edition was funded by the Top University Project of National Chengchi University, made possible by a grant from Taiwan's Ministry of Education.
Fig. 2.4. Percentages of three income groups voting for the Pan-Blue. Note: The survey for the 2000 presidential election lacks the question on household income. See appendix 2.A1 for the categorization of income groups. Data: See appendix 2.A3.
Fig. 2.8. Partisan identification with the Pan-Blue Alliance by ethnic groups, 1992–2012. Data source: Core Political Attitudes among Taiwanese (Election Study Center, NCCU).
Fig. 2.9. Partisan identification with the Pan-Green Alliance by ethnic groups, 1992–2012. Data source: Core Political Attitudes among Taiwanese (Election Study Center, NCCU).
Fig. 3.4. Taiwan voters’ views on Beijing’s friendliness toward the Taipei government, 1996–2012. Data source: Core Political Attitudes among Taiwanese. (Election Study Center, NCCU).