An Interdisciplinary Study of Voting Behavior in the 1996 Presidential Election (the First Telephone Interview)

The 1996 presidential election was the highest level executive election that Taiwan has ever faced. It is thus a necessary subject of study in the effort to understand voting behavior in Taiwan.

Our model of voting in Taiwan can be simplified as follows: the chance that a voter will vote for a certain candidate is influenced by partisan leanings, issue positions, evaluations of candidates, ethnic background, and social background. The frame adopted for this survey was the telephone listings for the Taiwan Area. In order to avoid being unable to select those residences with unlisted telephone numbers, we first took a systematic random sample of telephone numbers, and then replaced the last digit with a random number.