Recently, the decline in support for democracy in consolidated democracies has gained substantial attention and provoked a heated scholarly debate (Foa and Mounk, 2016). As multiple reasons may contribute to explaining why citizens have lost faith in democratic systems, this article focuses on the linkage between political polarization and democratic support at the mass level. By using data from a recent survey conducted in Taiwan, we first construct two measures of party polarization—namely, the affective polarization score and perceived issue polarization score. While the former can be regarded as an identity-based polarization measure, the latter is a policy-based measure. Then, we explore the associations between the two polarization measures and various attitudes toward democracy. Our empirical findings suggest that Taiwanese people who have more diverse affects toward the two major parties are more likely to make a negative assessment of Taiwan’s current and future democracy and be less supportive of the democratic system. However, people who perceive a greater issue polarization between the two major parties do not necessarily have more positive or negative attitudes toward democracy. As an implication for future democratic development, this analysis suggests that affective party polarization may be harmful to the health of democracy.
The premise of the intentional model of split-ticket voting is that some voters split their tickets simply because they prefer divided government and believe in constant "checks and balances." This article examines whether this premise stands firm in an emerging democracy like Taiwan. That is, by using survey data in Taiwan, we explore whether one's attitude toward divided or unified government is "real." We hypothesize that a citizen's attitude toward "checks and balances" is subject to change, and conditional on whether her preferred party is in power. Specifically, we speculate that a citizen would tend to hold the balancing perspective or favor divided government, if her preferred party is in opposition. However, if her preferred party becomes the ruling party, she would be more likely to oppose (hold) the balancing (non-balancing) perspective or favor unified government. We then utilize panel survey data embedded in Taiwan's Election and Democratization Studies (TEDS) to verify our hypothesis.Keywords: checks and balances; straight-and split-ticket voting; endogeneity 1 All correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Eric Chen-Hua Yu at Election Study Center & Department of Political Science, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan or by email at ericyu@nccu.edu.tw. Research -ISSN 2288-6168 (Online) Vol. 2 No.3 May 2015: 196-227 http://dx.doi.org/10.15206/ajpor.2015 Asian Journal for Public Opinion 197The phenomenon of divided government has attracted considerable scholarly attention in the study of American politics over the past decades. One of the major controversies is its cause. While divided government is an aggregated result of certain voting patterns, scholars tend to develop micro-level theories to explain why voters caste their votes in those ways.In the context of American politics, a divided government is not unusual. Yet, unlike the periods of divided government in the late nineteenth century, during which divided government mainly occurred in off-year elections as the electorate changed the majority party in congressional elections, divided government in the post World War II period is driven by the rise of split-ticket voting in presidential elections-votes for one party for president and the other party for their members of Congress (Brady, 1993;Fiorina, 1992).As split-ticket voting appears to be a common practice for a portion of voters and can be regarded as the main cause of a divided government, then the question becomes why voters tend to do so.Empirical research purports two major models to explain split-ticket voting: the intentional and unintentional models. The intentional model of split-ticket voting mainly follows the logic of "balancing theory" argued by Fiorina (1992Fiorina ( , 1996. The intuition behind the theory is fairly straightforward-some voters split their tickets simply because they prefer divided, but "balanced" government. In other words, a portion of voters tend to engage in intentionally, sophisticated voting behaviors (i.e., ticke...
To maintain good health, people need to take suitable calories every day. The calories needed for persons depend on their personal features, such as gender, age, weight and levels of physical activity. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model to generate optimized diet lists according to individual conditions. To keep a sustainable environment, the carbon footprint related to diet is also considered in the model. Integer programming is employed to help users find solutions and compose suitable diet lists. As the number of candidate items and constraints become larger, the optimization problem discussed here becomes more complex. Given such understanding, a variety of experiments are performed to investigate the influences of some critical factors on the results. Experiments from this study show that the proposed approach can generate satisfying diet lists effectively.
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