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Does candidate nomination in districts increase party votes of small parties? Evidence from the 2016 Taiwan legislative elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2018

Ching-Hsing Wang ,
Dennis Lu-Chung Weng  and
Vincent Wei-Cheng Wang
Ching-Hsing Wang*
Affiliation:
Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston, Houston, USA
Dennis Lu-Chung Weng
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, USA
Vincent Wei-Cheng Wang
Affiliation:
School of Humanities and Sciences, Ithaca College, Ithaca, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: cwang3@central.uh.edu
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Abstract

This study addresses why small parties nominate candidates to run in the district elections and how nomination of district candidates could influence small parties’ share of party votes in Taiwan. Previous studies on party's strategic entry in the mixed electoral system demonstrate the existence of ‘contamination effect’ in various Western democracies. While ‘contamination effect’ suggests that party would gain more proportional representation (PR) seats by increasing its number of candidate nomination in the single-member-district (SMD) races, we contend that small parties should also take the strength of nominated candidates into consideration. Nominating strong candidates in SMD competitions could generate positive ‘spillover effect’ to party's PR tier. By focusing on the 2016 Taiwan legislative election, our findings suggest that first, small parties need to fulfill the institutional requirements in order to qualify for running in the party-list election; second, the ‘contamination effect’ exists in Taiwan, but it is conditional; and finally, candidates’ strength creates positive ‘spillover effect’ on party's proportional seats.

Keywords

Candidate nominationcontamination effectmixed electoral systemmultilevel modelingparty vote
Type
Research Article
Information
Japanese Journal of Political Science , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 461 - 473
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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