Conflict Displacement and Regime Transition in Taiwan: A Spatial Analysis

Abstract

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.

Social or political cleavages? A spatial analysis of the party system in post-authoritarian Chile

“…While early empirical applications of this model required rather restrictive assumptions (e.g., one-dimensional choice, single-peaked preferences), later work adapted it to less restrictive situations Hinich 1966, 1968;Romer and Rosenthal 1978;Cox 1990;Hinich and Munger 1994). Scholars have applied the Cahoon-Hinich spatial modeling technique to analyze party systems as diverse as the United States (Enelow and Hinich 1984;Ghobarah 2000), Taiwan (Lin et al 1996), Germany (Pappi and Eckstein 1998), Ukraine (Hinich et al 1999), and Turkey (Carkoglu and Hinich 2006).…”

Change and Continuity in Taiwan’s Public Opinion on the Cross-Strait Economic Interactions

“…the status quo), so that Taiwan will be separated from China permanently (Lin et al, 1996;Niou, 1996a, 1996b). Basically, those who lean toward or do not rule out the possibility of unification are likely to support the Pan-Blue camp, while those who are in favor of independence tend to back the Pan-Green camp.…”

Political Unification and Independence in the Media: The Case of Taiwan

“…In the area of political attitudes, the most polarizing issue in Taiwan is without doubt that of unification versus independence for Taiwan (Chu & Lin, 2001;Hsieh & Niou, 1996;Lin, Chu, & Hinich, 1996;Wachman, 1994;Wang, 2008;Wu, 1992;Wu, 1993Wu, , 2005Wu, 1997;Wu, 1999Wu, , 2001Sheng, 2002;Chen, 2003;You, 1996;You, Lin, & Lim, 2013). Since 1990, attitudes among the Taiwanese public on the matter of unification versus independence has shifted between these two polar extremes.…”