Current Issue
Volume #28, Number #2
Published in December, 2024
In the recent decade, the global retreat of democratic supportespecially among younger generations - and authoritarian diffusion becomes salient issues. In particular, the contested model of “democracy” comes into focus between the U.S. and China strategic competition. This study explores the democratic support in Taiwan, where it is often ranked as a top liberal democracy in Asia but also a frontline of the great power competition. We focus on the China factor, testing whether citizens’ evaluation on China, especially the negative impacts, is associated with people’s assessment of democracy. This study utilizes the China Impact Survey (2016) and Taiwan’s Election and Democratization Study (TEDS 2021) to examine levels of democratic support in Taiwan. In the data of 2016, I find that the China factors become significant in shaping political attitudes. People who value national sovereignty and have negative evaluation on China’s government tend to express support for democracy. Furthermore, the data of 2021 demonstrates that democratic support is significantly associated with evaluations of China and the U.S. That is, the U.S.-China competition and the fight for legitimacy between democracies and autocracies in global politics do have impacts on democratic support at the individual level.
Confucius has been generally regarded by scholars outside the sinophone sphere as a moral teacher. In this article, I propose a particular theoretical framework (the two-foldness of human nature) to re-present Confucius’ political thought in a modern form. I start my re-presentation from a core phenomenon in political life, and argue that Confucius’ political thought aims to provide a radical alternative to that phenomenon. Re-presented in this way, Confucius’ political thought is made of a network of coherent arguments, which makes it intelligible to modern political theorists and open to discussions and criticisms by them.
Since the 1990s, Taiwanese citizens’ unification-independence stances have been a critical variable in electoral and voting behavior studies. While scholars generally acknowledge that these stances are not entirely equivalent to state identity, national identity, or party identification, the degree of overlap among these dimensions remains underexplored. Many reports and commentaries continue to conflate unificationindependence stances with state/national identity. The unificationindependence spectrum assumes a binary opposition between unification and independence and continuity across response options, with the middle labeled as “maintaining the status quo.” This study uses qualitative and quantitative methods to assess the validity of measuring unificationindependence stances. Qualitative analysis examines conceptual overlaps through a 2011 focus group discussion, analyzing how respondents with different partisan leanings integrate unification-independence stances, national identity, and party identification into their views on state identity. The quantitative analysis applies multiple correspondence analysis to nationally representative survey data from 2020 (N=1,190) to evaluate latent associations among these measures and the continuity of response options. Both approaches reveal that unification-independence stances do not fully align with national, state, or partisan identities, and the scale’s response options lack internal continuity. This finding of a “discontinuous spectrum” extends prior scholarly critiques and offers new insights for researchers studying national identity.