Criticism and Bias: How Citizens Evaluate the Quality of Democracy in Taiwan
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Hao, Wei-Chih
Abstract
The quality of democracy is the new concept of democratic research in modern times. People study the quality of democracy views democracy as the main product of political system. The procedure, content and outcome of political system are the criteria for measuring what a good democracy is. The study in quality of democracy can remind government of the shortcoming they have. However, it was evident that in many cases democratic evaluations from people didn’t directly reflect the performance of government. The evaluation of the quality of democracy may be affected by other factors. As a result, this article focuses on how citizens evaluate the quality of democracy.
In this article, we use “Critics” and “The biased” of quality of democracy to be the substitutes for “critical citizens” and “election winners.” What we want to know is whether “Critics” and “The biased” may affect the evaluation of citizens or not. The hypothesis here is that critical citizens may have low evaluations because of their high standards of democracy and election winners may have high evaluation because of bias which exists between electee and voter.
By using data from the third wave of the Asia Barometer Survey in Taiwan 2011, this article reveals that “Critics” and “The biased” of the quality of democracy actually have real impact on the dimension of the quality of democracy including procedure, content, result, and governance. Furthermore, the more abstract the indices of evaluation are, the more easily the indices of evaluation will be influenced by personal subjective perception. The specific indices of evaluation are less influenced by personal subjective perception. In conclusion, the quality of democracy may not be as fair as our imagination. There are too many factors that intervene in the evaluations of the quality of democracy.
Subjects
quality of democracy
critical citizens
election winners
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-101-R98322026-1.pdf
Size
23.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):24e0a678f06921dece93b845f91e4cbb