The Taiwan Voter examines the critical role ethnic and national identities play in politics, utilizing the case of Taiwan. Although elections there often raise international tensions, and have led to military demonstrations by China, no scholarly books have examined how Taiwan’s voters make electoral choices in a dangerous environment. Critiquing the conventional interpretation of politics as an ideological battle between liberals and conservatives, The Taiwan Voter demonstrates in Taiwan the party system and voters’ responses are shaped by one powerful determinant of national identity—the China factor. Taiwan’s electoral politics draws international scholarly interest because of the prominent role of ethnic and national identification. While in most countries the many tangled strands of competing identities are daunting for scholarly analysis, in Taiwan the cleavages are powerful and limited in number, so the logic of interrelationships among issues, partisanship, and identity are particularly clear. The Taiwan Voter unites experts to investigate the ways in which social identities, policy views, and partisan preferences intersect and influence each other. These novel findings have wide applicability to other countries, and will be of interest to a broad range of social scientists interested in identity politics.

Sayonara to the Lee Teng-hui Era brings together the most prominent American, Taiwanese, and Chinese scholars in the field and addresses very crucial issues involved in Taiwan's democratization. The book is pluralist in methodology, ranging from content analysis and historical elaboration to game theoretical formulations. The combination of qualitative and quantitative studies enriches the understanding of the political intrigues of this era. Its wealth of data and careful examination of various issues from different theoretical approaches make this volume an essential guide for courses and research. In sum, the book reflects a commitment to a theoretically sophisticated and empirically based synthetic study of Taiwan's political development in the 1990s.