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The 2014 Sunflower Movement led to rising political participation among young Taiwanese. Hence, opposition parties and civic groups created programs to support young candidates running in the village chief elections. Compared with the 2010 election, however, fewer young challengers ran in 2014, and they received fewer votes and won fewer seats. Propensity score matching shows that the presence of young candidates on ballots did not increase turnout. However, young candidates affected the election indirectly: young, new candidates attracted more votes from incumbents than from challengers and therefore decreased the incumbent re-election rate.

To repress growing regional/national identity in Taiwan, China applies rationalist strategies, including economic incentives and military threats. Analysis of the Taiwan National Security Survey in 2003–2015 shows that China's carrot and stick policies negatively correlate with exclusive Taiwanese identity. In younger generations, perception of the strength of the policies is similar, but their effect on identity is weaker.

Why do people risk their lives fighting in wars? This article looks beyond group grievance and material benefits to addanother psychological mechanism explaining why people choose to fight ornotto fight – perceived collective action.An individual is much more likely to fight when they perceive that others will also fight. Contrary to the expectationsof social identity theory and social pressure theory, the effect of perceived collective action is stronger among thosewho have a weaker national identity because they are more likely to rationally calculate the chance of winning byaccounting for others' decisions. To mitigate the endogeneity in post-conflict cross-sectional surveys, we conduct asurvey experiment (n¼1,001) in Taiwan manipulating perceptions of others' willingness to fight in a potentialChina–Taiwan military conflict. Experimental evidence supports the hypotheses that perceived collective actionworks only on weak Taiwanese identifiers. The result holds in robustness checks and in another nationally repre-sentative survey.

Why do people risk their lives fighting in wars? This article looks beyond group grievance and material benefits to add another psychological mechanism explaining why people choose to fight or not to fight – perceived collective action. An individual is much more likely to fight when they perceive that others will also fight. Contrary to the expectations of social identity theory and social pressure theory, the effect of perceived collective action is stronger among those who have a weaker national identity because they are more likely to rationally calculate the chance of winning by accounting for others' decisions. To mitigate the endogeneity in post-conflict cross-sectional surveys, we conduct a survey experiment (n = 1,001) in Taiwan manipulating perceptions of others' willingness to fight in a potential China–Taiwan military conflict. Experimental evidence supports the hypotheses that perceived collective action works only on weak Taiwanese identifiers. The result holds in robustness checks and in another nationally representative survey.

Early studies show that the COVID-19 pandemic causes the rally-around-the-flag effect and increases the level of nationalism among the voters after the outbreak. However, how long does this boost last? Voters may cognitively withdraw their identification to the beloved country if the pandemic is rampant in where they live as well as when the government fails to address it thoroughly. We conducted a pre-registered MTurk experiment (n = 606) on 20 April 2020, in the United States—3 months after the first confirmed case and weeks after the large-scale lockdown. Results show that US subjects who were primed of the COVID-19 in the United States significantly decreased their level of nationalism, especially among Democrats. In contrast, the priming of "COVID-19 in the world" has no effect. The negative impact of COVID-19 on nationalism could be explained by enough time as people could observe and evaluate the government's performance after the outbreak through the partisan lens.

How does the entrance of radical candidates influence election results? Conventional wisdom suggests that extreme candidates merely split the votes. Based on the range effect theory in cognitive psychology, we hypothesize that the entrance of an extreme candidate reframes the endpoints of the ideological spectrum among available candidates, which makes the moderate one on the same side to be perceived by the voters as even more moderate. Through two survey experiments in the United States and Taiwan, we provide empirical support for range effect in the vote choice in the plurality system. The results imply that a mainstream party can, even without changing its own manifesto, benefit from the entrance of its radical counterpart; it explains why the mainstream party may choose cooperation strategically. Our findings also challenge the assumption in regression models that the perceived ideological positions of candidates are independent of each other.

Why do so many voters finance candidates, even out-of-district ones? We exploit two datasets from a candidate in the 2014 Taiwan City Mayor Election derived from 14,838 detail donation records and the candidate's 296 Facebook posts during the campaign. We replicate previous findings at the district level, indicating that donations are influenced by both physical proximity and ideology. The post-level analysis shows that the neighboring effect does not build as a spillover of public policy or administrative reforms. Instead, residents donate more merely because they are closer to a campaign. Meanwhile, a candidate's ideological posts can successfully increase donations within a few hours from a district where there are more friendly voters.