Chang, Eric, and Yun-han Chu. “Quality of Political Choice and Popular Orientation toward Democracy.” In Democratization in Taiwan: Challenges in Transformation, edited by James Meernik and Phil Paolino. Under contract at Ashgate Press.

 

Abstract

This paper argues that elections in or by themselves are not sufficient to guarantee citizens’ support for democracy. Meaningful political choices are the key. Particularly in presidential and semi-presidential systems, meaningful political choice boils down to the availability of credible and capable national political figures, who are the tangible embodiment of political parties, contending political blocs, and/or competing policy options. In other words, we hypothesize that citizens are not likely to maintain a strong faith in democracy if they can find few or no credible and capable political leaders. We test our hypothesis against data collected in the 2003 Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study. Our finding, surviving demanding robustness tests, provides clear and strong empirical support for our hypothesis.