Election Cycle and Roll Call Requests: Identifying the Target Audience

• In Event: Legislative Politics and Emerging Social Issues in Taiwan

Abstract

The record of roll call voting is usually used for estimating preferences of legislators in political science. However, previous research concerns about selection bias for adopting this voting mechanism, and this possibility could undermine the credibility of the estimations for preferences. The debate about why roll call voting is applied in some cases but not the others is still not settled: some papers suggest that the key determinant is issue type, and some attribute to the intensity of party competition in legislation. Furthermore, the effect of electing timing is missing in discussions. This paper evaluates these contending theories for roll call requests with Taiwan legislative voting, a two-party system with a strict party line. Under this legislative system, we know there are only few legislators have ever voted against the orders from their party. With the 8th Legislative Yuan data, however, instead of requesting roll call votes to discipline party legislators, this research shows that the opposition parties are the active actors facilitating this political tool and the goal is to force the ruling party to express its policy stance publicly. Overall the parties aim at different goals with roll call voting as a political tool and different strategies the parties applied this mechanism when approaching elections revealed this significant but often neglected fact.

Authors

• Weihao Huang, Academia Sinica

• Greg Chih-Hsin Sheen, New York University Abu Dhabi