Electronic Resources in the Study of Elite Political Behaviour in Taiwan

Abstract

The objective of this article is to survey the abundance of primary source electronic data, and appropriate methods, which could be used to advance the study of elite politics in Taiwan. Research on public attitudes and voting behaviour has benefited enormously from open scholarly access to systematically collected, reliable data resources. Research on elite political behaviour in Taiwan could similarly benefit from the creation of supplementary datasets derived from electronic primary sources. I argue that the primary resources and methods needed are already in place, for instance, to produce quantitative estimates of the policy preferences and ideological positions of parties and individual political actors over time. A variety of political texts created by political actors at all levels of office (and indeed, in opposition) are readily accessible online. With a small degree of processing, these electronic texts can easily be rendered in machine-readable format for analysis by means of computer-assisted content analysis software. Despite successes in other contexts, these data and methods are currently underutilized in studies of elite political behaviour in Taiwan.

Strategic cross-Strait discourse: A comparative analysis of three presidential terms

“…The Office of the President's website represents a comprehensive and regularly updated database of speeches, 34 and we are confident that the set of speeches we analyse in this article is a close approximation of the entirety of Chen and Ma's presidential speech output. The speeches were downloaded from the website of the Office of the President 33 in Chinese and converted into machine-readable format for subsequent analysis.…”

“…The speeches were downloaded from the website of the Office of the President 33 in Chinese and converted into machine-readable format for subsequent analysis. The Office of the President's website represents a comprehensive and regularly updated database of speeches, 34 and we are confident that the set of speeches we analyse in this article is a close approximation of the entirety of Chen and Ma's presidential speech output. To construct the content dictionary we used the Yoshikoder, an open-source software package developed by Will Lowe.…”

The Coevolution of Media and Politics in Taiwan: Implications for Political Communications

“…It soon surpassed one hundred thousand likes and included such enticements as an application for joining a band and playing a virtual song with the president. Ma was effective at integrating his social media presence, including an active YouTube channel for delivering unmediated personal video messages, into the government communications infrastructure (Sullivan, 2013). Ma wrote on Facebook that "it is the government's responsibility to let the people clearly understand it's policy ideas […] wherever the people are the government should be too."…”

“…During the past two decades, Taiwanese media has regularly ranked among Asia's freest (Sullivan et al, 2018). Among other things, sensationalism and questionable ethical practices for instance (Wang and Cohen, 2009), the contemporary media environment in and advances in government communications (Lee et al, 2005;Sullivan, 2013). Prior work has addressed the role of institutions (Rawnsley, 2003a), political culture (Mattlin, 2004), national identity (Hsu, 2014), party behaviour (Fell, 2005) and strategy (Sullivan and Sapir, 2012).…”

The Impacts of Changing Ruling Parties in the Twenty-First Century

“…As the possibility of such an election-driven change of ruling parties is one of the most important features distinguishing democracies from authoritarian states, attention in Taiwan usually centres on the shifting of power from one party to another, as well as on the island's electoral system, party politics, election campaigns, national identity and political behaviour (e.g. Fell 2006Fell , 2011Rawnsley 2003;Rigger 1999Rigger , 2001Rigger , 2006Sullivan 2013aSullivan , 2013b. There are an impressive number of studies which compare and contrast the social, cultural, political and economic conditions in Taiwan before and after democratisation (e.g.…”