Electoral Consequences of Voters’ Perceived Party Ambiguity in Taiwan

• In Event: Understanding Mass Behavior in Taiwan in a New Era

Abstract

Democratic accountability requires voters to establish clear expectations about future party behavior, and unequivocal party stances on various issues help voters accomplish this task. While the independence-unification issue has been driving political competition in Taiwan for decades, the questions as to whether voters form their perceptions of party ambiguity on the independence-unification issue and the consequences of these perceptions have remained understudied. In this paper, we answer these questions by directly investigating voters’ perceptions of party ambiguity on the independence-unification issue in an innovative survey we fielded in December 2022. Our analyses suggest that there is a significant variation in how citizens perceive the policy ambiguity of several parties in Taiwan on the independence-unification issue and that these perceptions further structure their vote choices in upcoming elections. Specifically, voters who perceive higher levels of ambiguity of a party on the independence-unification issue are less likely to vote for the party, and this relationship is further conditioned by one’s partisanship and political sophistication. These results therefore provide implications for the scholarly understanding of party competition and mass behavior in Taiwan.

Author

• Nick Lin, Academia Sinica