Measuring Taiwanese public opinion on Taiwanese independence

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. © The China Quartery, 2005.

Duke Scholars

Author Emerson S. Niou Political Science