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Conflict Displacement and Regime Transition in Taiwan: A Spatial Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Tse-Min Lin ,
Yun-Han Chu  and
Melvin J. Hinich
Melvin J. Hinich
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin Taiwan University University of Texas, Austin
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Abstract

This paper presents a spatial analysis of political competition in Taiwan in an effort to explore the role of conflict displacement in the process of democratic transition. In recent elections, a new cleavage on socioeconomic justice has emerged as a salient political issue in Taiwan, crosscutting the traditional cleavage on national identity. The authors first trace the historical trajectory of regime transition in order to provide a structural explanation of such a displacement of conflicts. Using data from the 1992 General Survey on Social Changes designed primarily by the authors for the Institute of Ethnology of Academia Sinica, they then present the results of a spatial analysis. The empirical findings confirm that socioeconomic justice together with national identity are the defining dimensions of the latent ideological space in which political competition takes place. The authors argue that, because of the availability of the new issue, political elites in Taiwan are undertaking a partisan realignment in both electoral and legislative politics, a process the authors consider conducive to both the transition to democracy and the consolidation of the new regime.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , July 1996 , pp. 453 - 481
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1996

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References

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24 Missing values in the valence items are not a problem since, in the version of the Cahoon program (see Appendix 1) that we use, the mean valence scores, rather than the individual scores, are entered as part of the program input.

25 Enelow and Hinich (fn. 8).

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28 Note that we are able to make inferences about the effects of age and social class because neither is causally related to national identity. For those demographic variables known to have an impact on the first dimension, the corresponding coefficients are inconsistent, and no statistical inference can be made about their effects.

29 The New Party actually cast the decisive vote in this case to save the KMT from an embarrassing defeat. For the roll-call records of the aforementioned bills, see Lifayuan Gongbao (various issues, 1993–94).

30 As a symbolic gesture, Mayor Chen attended the annual flag-raising ceremony at dawn on New Year's Day 1995.

31 China Times, September 15, 1995, p. 2.

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34 In this study, we use the squared Euclidean distance as a measure of proximity. The methodology of spatial analysis, however, can accommodate other types of distance.

35 The program, originally developed by Lawrence S. Cahoon, is available upon request from Tse-min Lin, the primary author.

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