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We develop an aggregate model of the presidential vote based on the appropriation of political as well as economic information by a rational voter. We argue that, depending upon historical context, information about political corruption is relevant to individual, and hence aggregate, vote choice. In preindustrial, community-oriented machine politics, the rational voter exchanged votes for particularistic benefits. As the social and political perspective shifted to a universalistic standard, information about corruption has become for him or her one of the criteria by which to evaluate the performance of the incumbent party. By including information about corruption alongside information about the economy, our model significantly improves upon conventional economic voting models in explaining post-New Deal presidential election outcomes.

This paper presents a spatial analysis of political competition in Taiwan in an effort to explore the role of conflict displacement in the process of democratic transition. In recent elections, a new cleavage on socioeconomic justice has emerged as a salient political issue in Taiwan, crosscutting the traditional cleavage on national identity. The authors first trace the historical trajectory of regime transition in order to provide a structural explanation of such a displacement of conflicts. Using data from the 1992 General Survey on Social Changes designed primarily by the authors for the Institute of Ethnology of Academia Sinica, they then present the results of a spatial analysis. The empirical findings confirm that socioeconomic justice together with national identity are the defining dimensions of the latent ideological space in which political competition takes place. The authors argue that, because of the availability of the new issue, political elites in Taiwan are undertaking a partisan realignment in both electoral and legislative politics, a process the authors consider conducive to both the transition to democracy and the consolidation of the new regime.

This article argues that, like fashion, national identity may be influenced by “neighbors” in a broadly defined sense. Inspired by models of collective choice, we hypothesize that, in Taiwan, a subethnically divided society facing a dilemma in its relationship with China, township residents and occupational peers are subject to mutual influence in the formation of their national identity. Methodologically, we compare spatial regression with dummy variable regression and hierarchical linear models. Based on spatial regression with survey data, our findings show that the formation of national identity in Taiwan indeed exhibits strong neighborhood influence.

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