Data suggests Taiwan voters increasingly identify as non-partisan.
The News Lens
Date: 2018/05/25
By: Austin Horng-En Wang and Yeh-Lih Wang
Photo Credit: CC by Studio Incendo/Flickr
In the past two years, one of the most important phenomenon in Taiwan politics is the emergence of non-partisans. For the first time since democratization, more than half of Taiwanese voters do not support any party in Taiwan.
This dramatic change may attribute to the electoral reform in 2005 as well as President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文)’s performance. The shift will undoubtedly impact on the major parties’ intraparty politics and strategic choices. However, what these non-partisans want and where they are from remains unclear.
To begin with, the figure below shows the percentage of partisans and non-partisans in the past 10 waves of the Taiwan National Security Survey (TNSS) from 2002 to 2017. TNSS is a representative telephone survey sponsored by Duke University and conducted by National Chengchi University. After Tsai won the presidency in early 2016, the proportion of non-partisans in Taiwan reached an historic high of 48 percent. In late 2017, the record was broken again, breaking 51 percent, representing a doubling of the proportion of non-partisans in Taiwan since 2011. Today, more than half of Taiwanese people do not attach to any party in Taiwan, according to the survey.
Who are these non-partisans? Analysis of TNSS 2017 fails to reveal any unique characteristics among them. Applying the chi-squared test shows that non-partisans share the same socio-demographic background as partisans across age, gender, race, level of education, language usage, and residency. Besides, Taipei City does not have a higher proportion of non-partisans than other municipal areas or counties. The decline of partisanship has become a general trend among all Taiwanese people.
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