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...