Suchergebnisse

In the 2000 presidential election, the Kuomintang (KMT) lost badly, but it remains the majority party in the Legislative Yuan. In the foreseeable future, it will continue to be a formidable force in Taiwanese politics as long as it is able to hold itself together. Its strength derives essentially from its unique position along the national identity spectrum, the most salient division underpinning Taiwan's party structure. Given the stability of voters' distribution on the national identity issue, the relative strength of the pan-KMT and the pan-Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) camps – referring to the two major parties and the parties split from them – will remain roughly the same. Under the circumstances, the major challenge confronting the KMT does not come from the DPP, but from within the pan-KMT camp. Here, other issues and even personalities may play a much more important role in shaping the configuration within the pan-KMT camp, thus affecting the KMT's overall strength.

Whether there will be a war between China and Taiwan depends very much upon whether Taiwan will declare independence. And given that Taiwan is a democracy now, public opinion on the issue will certainly affect the political leaders' decision to move one way or the other. Since the early 1990s, several competing methods have been used in surveys to study Taiwanese attitudes on the independence – unification issue. The existence of a large percentage of respondents with conditional preferences makes us realize that the traditional six-point or 11-point scale measures of preferences oversimplify the situation. In this article, we construct a new measure of preferences and show that it clearly outperforms the traditional methods.