Citizen’s Attitude toward “Checks-and-Balances”: Exploratory Study of the Panel Data on the Second Turnover in Taiwan
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Horng-En Wang, Austin
Abstract
Citizen’s support of checks-and-balances (CB) is one of the most important democratic values in developing and consolidating democracy, a belief that compromise is both necessary and desirable. Do Taiwanese voters support the idea of CB? What are the theoretical and practical issues in analyzing attitude toward CB? Are those CB attitudes measured nowadays the same as what they apparently are? What are the origin and explanation of diverse types of CB support among Taiwanese voters?
Taiwan had just experienced the first split-government during 2000-2008. In 2004 congressional election, the incumbent pan-green camp attracted voters by the slogan of “unified and then efficient government”, while the opposite pan-blue camp appealed to voters for the value of constitutional balances. Yet, once the pan-blue camp won back both of the congress and president seats in 2008, the two camps opted for the government structure to which they previously opposed. The dramatic position switch is a rare and valuable case for analyzing Taiwanese people’s stability or change in attitudes toward CB.
In the beginning of literature review, this thesis distinguishes the “party balancing” from the “institution balancing:” institution balancing is the constitutional separation of powers, but it cannot be realized without the split party control of power, the so-called party balancing or cognitive-Madisonianism, under today’s fierce partisan competition.
Second, this article categorizes current survey questions about CB into three groups: institution balancing, party balancing, and reality balancing, the middle one surpasses the other two in focusing on the topic of researching CB in Taiwan. Thanks to the psychological theory of attitude strength, three types of CB attitudes and their preferences for party control of government are established, including “party balancing attitude,” “conditional balancing attitude,” and “others”. Furthermore, the article hypothesizes three possible and empirically testable origins of strong CB attitudes: citizen’s personal experience, the relatively mild cross-strait issue position, and dual nationality.
Two panel data are used to test the hypotheses, TEDS2008L and TEDS2008P, both of which are conducted during the second turnover period. Analysis of contingency tables and line charts reveal that Taiwanese people attitudes toward CB are not stable, but not non-attitude neither; the stronger one’s party identification is, the more possible he or she changed his or her CB attitude along with the party leader or candidate. Moreover, ANOVA and Multinomial logit regression analysis show that the proportion of party balancing, conditional balancing, and others are about 20%, 30%, and 50%. Moreover, Taiwanese people those who are young, female, highly educated, identified with party, and knowledgeable about politics, are more likely to hold the real party balancing. In contrast, people with the strongest party identification and the highest political knowledge tend to hold conditional balancing attitude. The results pinpoint the statistical problem of endogeneity that had been neglected by previous studies, and forecast the trend that the number of Taiwanese people with party balancing attitude would gradually increase in the future. In the last part of this article, the improvements of current survey question about CB are also suggested.
Subjects
Conditional Balancing
Institution Balancing
Party Balancing
Turnover
Madisonianism
Panel Data
SDGs
Type
thesis
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