The Impacts of Policy Issues on Voting Behavior in Taiwan: A Mixed Logit Approach

Abstract

Policy ideology does play an important role in influencing voting behavior since Downs proposed the famous spatial voting theory in 1957. The majority of the research in Taiwan however focuses much more on the sociological and psychological factors such as the ethnicity and ”Lee Tun-hui Complex”. This contribution of the study is to propose a jointed voting model to test different voting theories simultaneously. Moreover, Mixed Logit model that help to measure individual-specific and choice- specific independent variables is operated for several empirical tests on the 1996 Taiwan Presidential election. It is found that even if voter's party identification and evaluation on candidates' competent are significant, most of the sociological factors including the ethnicity, income, and education are not noteworthy in explaining voting decision as previous studies. Most importantly, voter's policy preference does play an important role although the policy distance between candidate and voter may not be the only way to affect the decision. It is found that the direction theory, proposed by Rabinowitz and MacDonald in 1989, is also significant.