A measure of Taiwan’s election results against global political trends.

The News Lens
Date: 2018/12/24
By: Ian Inkster, Mark Wenyi Lai & Victoria Hsin Hsin Chang, Asia Dialogue

Credit: AP/TPG / Wikicommons / US Air Force

The academic commentaries that have hit the scene in the Taiwanese newspapers and social media tend to be either rather extreme, or far too general and light-fingered to stand the many tests of time. There might be exceptions, but below is an attempt to run some of the results through a comparative lens in order to find some order in the complex results of the Nov. 24 elections and referendums.

Will a new generation of voters who are now glued to internet forums change the old political mobilization machine?

Gay marriage

On the international democracies scene at present there is little formal, national-based evidence concerning public attitudes to gay marriage, which is itself a vital element in how we might measure a nation’s attitudes towards gay, bisexual, and transgender people. The assumption in the UK, U.S. and much of Europe certainly seems to be that the populations at large are liberal in their attitudes as they become more informed, alert to and sympathetic to the complex issues concerned.
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