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Measuring Taiwanese Public Opinion on Taiwanese Independence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2005

John Fuh-sheng Hsieh  and
Emerson M.S. Niou
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Abstract

Whether there will be a war between China and Taiwan depends very much upon whether Taiwan will declare independence. And given that Taiwan is a democracy now, public opinion on the issue will certainly affect the political leaders' decision to move one way or the other. Since the early 1990s, several competing methods have been used in surveys to study Taiwanese attitudes on the independence – unification issue. The existence of a large percentage of respondents with conditional preferences makes us realize that the traditional six-point or 11-point scale measures of preferences oversimplify the situation. In this article, we construct a new measure of preferences and show that it clearly outperforms the traditional methods.

Type
Methodological Note
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 181 , March 2005 , pp. 158 - 168
Copyright
© The China Quarterly, 2005

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Conference on the Taiwan Election and Democratization Studies 2001 Survey, Taipei, Taiwan, October 2002. The author would like to thank Yu-Shan Wu and other conference participants for their helpful comments and suggestions.