ISSUE VOTING IN THE REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA ON TAIWAN 1992 LEGISLATIVE YUANELECTION

In the past few years, the Republic of China on Taiwan has undergone a quiet transformation from an authoritarian to a democratic system. On 19 December 1992, forty-five years after the first legislative yuan e lection, voters went to the poll to elect the entire body of the secon d legislative yuan. The 1992 election marks a turning point in the Roc 's electoral history. This paper examines the role that issues played in that election. The Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party competed on four main issues during the 1992 legislative yuan election . Based on the survey results, the paper depicts the salience of these issues to individual respondents, the distribution of respondents pre ferences, and their perceptions of the two parties' policy positions o n these issues. The authors then test whether these issues play an imp ortant role in explaining the variation in voters' evaluation of the t wo parties, and, indirectly, their vote choices. The results show that among the four issues included in the model, the democracy/stability issue has the greatest impact on voters' evaluations of parties, follo wed by the economic and national identity issues, with the environment al issue having the smallest impact. In addition, the paper examines t he role of issue salience in affecting voters' comparative evaluation of the parties. The results show that on the economic, national identi ty, and democracy/stability issues, difference in salience between tho se who think of the issue as most important and those who think otherw ise contributes to a difference in the impact of issues on party evalu ation between the two groups, but on the environmental issue it does n ot.