2009
Occasional Paper
Politics and Institutional Change › Political Parties and Elections
Wong, K. T. W. (2009). Who would change their vote and why? A case study on the 2006 Taipei and Kaohsiung Mayoral Elections. Occasional Paper No. 200. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Kaosiung Mayoral Elections Taipei Taiwan Voter
The aim of this paper is to identify who in Taiwan would tend to change their vote and to unveil their reasons for doing so, through an empirical study on the 2006 Taipei and Kaohsiung mayoral elections. Here, voting change is classified not simply as a change in an elector’s choice of vote from one party to another party but more particularly as any one of the following three categories of change in voting action:
(1) “change within the same camp/neutral”,
(2) “change to the opposition camp”, and
(3) “absent or invalid vote”.
An empirical analysis indicates that young people and males are more likely to change their choice of vote. Identification is the chief predictor of voting change in Taiwan. Weak party identity and political camp identity contribute to voting instability. People with a stronger party identity prefer to abstain from voting or to cast an invalid vote rather than change within the same camp or to a neutral group. By contrast, people with a stronger camp identity prefer to change within the same camp or to vote for candidates with a neutral background. A poor evaluation of a candidate would lead to a shift of vote to other candidates. A good performance from an incumbent can lead to the retention of support from the original electoral base and also attract votes from followers of opposition camps. Strategy voting would lead to a change in vote to a candidate within the same camp or to a candidate with a neutral background