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How to cool down Affective Polarization? A New Perspective of the ICED Framework
with Yi-Ping Lin
The study employs an online survey experiment to assess Identity, Cooperation, and Empathy's impact on Affective Polarization in Taiwan. Identity proves most effective, as respondents exposed to cheering songs during the World Baseball Classics show significantly lower polarization, indicating heightened unity based on identity. The Cooperation treatment slightly reduces polarization, fostering ruling party approval through political collaboration on Covid-19 challenges. However, Empathy's evidence remains incomplete, with treatments based on DPP and KMT backgrounds yielding opposing effects, emphasizing the necessity for additional clarification concerning the role of Empathy in driving polarization. We will present at ECPR Conference 2023; the manuscript is available by request.
Sway Centralized, Swing Localized: Failure of Party Nationalization in Taiwan
Many researchers have linked Centralization and Party Nationalization (PN), but two puzzles remain in the literature. First, confusing mechanism, with some arguing that Centralization leads to PN increases while others say that the reversed causality. Second, contradictory evidence; some studies find a positive correlation between the two, while others do not. Based on these problems, this article examines Taiwan’s ”Limited Centralization” (LC), which transfers power from the local grassroots to mayors instead of the central government. We also find that past cross-country studies suffer from measurement biases and overlook different mechanisms, and take this to argue that Centralization’s form does matter. Therefore, we use election data of Taiwan’s president over the past 24 years, considers the LC in 2010 as a treatment, and uses Difference in Difference and Matching as our identification strategy. The study finds that LC causes electoral swing localized, leading to the failure of PN, emphasizing the importance of considering the form of Centralization.
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