Despite the importance of political knowledge to democracy, there is still only a limited understanding of the political knowledge of the electorate. While research and empirics generally point to the existence of a positive association between partisanship and political knowledge, most of the electorate fail to notice the probable negative influence of party identification on political knowledge.

Taiwan’s new MMM legislative electoral system first implemented in 2008 was a sharp departure from the half-century long SNTV system. This paper examines effects of knowledge of the new electoral system on citizens’ decisions to vote or not to vote. Existing literature on voting either assumes that voters are fully aware of the electoral system and thus ignores the effect of knowledge or at best assumes it is an exogenous factor. This study distinguishes itself from other related works in three respects.

To elaborate the dynamics of the general mass attitudes in Taiwan toward the Unification-Independence issue, we explore both aggregate group behavior and individual level heterogeneity by converting consecutive cross-sectional data into a time-dependence structure. Apart from the current static models, these pseudo-panel analyses identify the relations between Elites' Rhetoric and the formation of mass choices on Taiwan's future.