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The conventional procedure for measuring political knowledge is treating nonresponses such as "don't know" as incorrect responses and counting the number of "correct" responses. In recent times, increasing attention has been paid to partial knowledge hidden within incorrect and nonresponses. This article explores partial knowledge indicated by incorrect and nonresponses and considers nonresponses as nonignorable missingness. We propose a model that combines the shared-parameter approach presented in the literature on missing data mechanisms and the methods of item response theory. We show that the proposed model can determine whether the people with nonresponses should be treated as more or less knowledgeable and detect whether it is appropriate to pool nonresponses and incorrect responses into the same category. Furthermore, we find partial knowledge hidden within women's nonresponses, which confirms the possibility of the exaggeration of the gender gap in political knowledge.

In Brazil's legislative process, political exchanges between the government and legislature is an essential feature. This article focuses on the role of the president and political parties in Brazil's national legislative process. Because nonideological factors influence voting, roll calls do not suffice for estimation of legislators' policy preferences. In this article, we derive a spatial model of voting in which voting behavior is induced by both ideological motivations and coalition dynamics and develop a multilevel ideal-point model implied by the spatial voting model. After the proposed model is applied to the analysis of roll-call votes in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies between 2003 and 2006, coalition dynamics is found to influence the voting behavior of legislators. We also confirm the finding in previous studies that the ideological alignment of political parties in the legislature contrasts with the perceived positions.

Whether democratic and non-democratic regimes perform differently in social provision policy is an important issue to social scientists and policy makers. As political regimes are rarely changing, their long-term or dynamic effects on the outcome are of concern to researchers when they evaluate how political regimes affect social policy. However, estimating the dynamic effects of rarely changing variables in the analysis of time-series cross-sectional data by conventional estimators may be problematic when the unit effects are included in the model specification. This article proposes a model to account for and estimate the correlation between the unit effects and explanatory variables. Applying the proposed model to 18 Latin American countries, this article finds evidence that democracy has a positive effect on social spending both in the short and long term.

There is some confusion in political science, and the social sciences in general, about the meaning and interpretation of interaction effects in models with non-interval, non-normal outcome variables. Often these terms are casually thrown into a model specification without observing that their presence fundamentally changes the interpretation of the resulting coefficients. This article explains the conditional nature of reported coefficients in models with interactions, defining the necessarily different interpretation required by generalized linear models. Methodological issues are illustrated with an application to voter information structured by electoral systems and resulting legislative behavior and democratic representation in comparative politics.

Most of the extant research on the relationship between democratic values and democratic support examine the issue from the perspective of the evolution of democratic culture and institutional learning. These studies conclude that it takes time for people to understand the essence of democracy and to support democracy. We argue that a certain value orientation is crucial to democratic support at some stages of democratic transition. To empirically examine the association between the different dimensions of democratic values and democratic support, we analyzed survey data from 1995 to 2020 in Taiwan. Based on item response theory, we found that, first, throughout that 25-year period, we can distinguish three dimensions of democratic values in Taiwan; second, Taiwanese considered fundamental human rights to be an essential democratic value; and finally, the curvilinear relationship between democratic support and separation of powers implies that Taiwanese people emphasize electoral democracy more than horizontal accountability after democratization is complete.

AbstractIn this article, we examine how antipartyism influences the public's preferences for the tools of presidential power by focusing on the case of Taiwan, which is a president-parliamentary system. We distinguish two types of antipartyism: general antipartyism and reactive antipartyism. The former refers to the general perception of political parties, whereas the latter involves the functions of parties in modern democracy. According to the analysis results, we find that general antipartyism is positively associated with support for the president's power to unilaterally appoint judges. In contrast, reactive antipartyism leads to less support for executive privilege, unilateral judicial appointments, and the authority to direct agency implementation of policies passed by the legislature.

Due to the crucial role of political knowledge in democratic participation, the measurement of political knowledge has been a major concern in the discipline of political science. Common formats used for political knowledge questions include multiple-choice items and open-ended identification questions. The conventional wisdom holds that multiple-choice items induce guessing behavior, which leads to underestimated item-difficulty parameters and biased estimates of political knowledge. This article examines guessing behavior in multiple-choice items and argues that a successful guess requires certain levels of knowledge conditional on the difficulties of items. To deal with this issue, we propose a Bayesian IRT guessing model that accommodates the guessing components of item responses. The proposed model is applied to analyzing survey data in Taiwan, and the results show that the proposed model appropriately describes the guessing components based on respondents' levels of political knowledge and item characteristics. That is, in general, partially informed respondents are more likely to have a successful guess because well-informed respondents do not need to guess and barely informed ones are highly seducible by the attractive distractors. We also examine the gender gap in political knowledge and find that, even when the guessing effect is accounted for, men are more knowledgeable than women about political affairs, which is consistent with the literature.

ObjectivePrevious studies of public attitudes toward immigration have been set in economically developed areas such as the United States and the countries of Western Europe, implicitly applying the term "immigrants" solely to blue‐collar laborers. In this article, we extend the discussion to Taiwan, a newly democratic and nearly developed country in East Asia.MethodsOur study investigates public attitudes toward immigrants with different occupations and test predictions derived from both economic and cultural approaches.ResultsFrom an analysis of the survey data, we find different economic factors for pro‐immigration attitudes toward foreign professionals and laborers.ConclusionsSpecifically, people who have higher incomes are more likely to allow foreign professionals to become citizens, and people with positive assessments of national and individual economic conditions are more likely to favor the inflow of foreign workers. Furthermore, cultural tolerance and a high level of education are correlated to pro‐migration attitudes toward both foreign professionals and laborers.