...extent, influenced their vote choice. (1) Nevertheless, before the 2000 Taiwan presidential election, this issue was only a domestic issue as the pro-independence DPP did not show any real chance of becoming the ruling party in Taiwan. The DPP's victory in the 2000 presidential election has made the Taiwan independence issue a key factor affecting stability in the Taiwan Strait. China is now uncertain as to Taiwan's official policy on the Taiwan independence issue and has consistently vowed to use military force against Taiwan if it announces formal independence. The future development of this issue in Taiwan's domestic politics thus has the danger of upsetting the delicate security balance in the Taiwan Strait and through it, east-Asian stability as well.

Given the importance of the independence issue on both Taiwan's domestic politics and the security balance in the Taiwan Strait, it is understandable that surveys have been conducted regularly to track shifts in public sentiment on this issue in Taiwan. (2) The standard approach has generally been to measure the independence-unification variable one-dimensionally with preferences for unification and independence at the extremes and preservation of the status quo representing the centrist position. Another research method abandons the assumption that respondents' positions can be located somewhere along a one-dimensional policy space between independence and unification. Were China to become more open, democratic, and prosperous, unification might be preferred to the status quo but if China were to renounce the use of force against Taiwan, independence might be preferred to the status quo. In other words, it is possible that respondents could have conditional preferences. (3) Whereas this research approach reveals how individuals might be persuaded to abandon the status quo position in favor of independence or unification, it stops short of helping us understand what might cause opinion shifts in the other direction. That is, we are left wondering about the conditions under which individuals having a first preference for independence or unification might feel it necessary to abandon their ideal preference and instead choose the status quo because the cost of achieving their first preferences is perceived to be too high.

In this article I devise a new measure of the independence-unification issue to discover the actual composition of the general public's preferences on this issue. The article is presented according to the following outline. The first section provides a review of the previous attempts to measure the independence-unification issue. The second section explores the conditionality of preferences of Taiwanese voters on the independence-unification issue by utilizing an innovative approach to disaggregate and interpret the pro-status quo majority. The third section studies whether the proposed new measure performs better statistically than the old measures. The final section concludes.

Three ways to measure preferences in surveys

In the last decade various methods have been experimented with by researchers in Taiwan attempting to measure Taiwanese preferences on the independence-unification issue. In this section, I introduce three of the commonly used measures. (4) The first measure asks respondents to pick a point from to 10, with standing for independence as soon as possible and 10 for unification as soon as possible. The wording of the survey question is thus:

(Measure 1) The issue of unification and independence is a much discussed topic in our society. Some people advocate that Taiwan should declare independence at once; some believe that Taiwan should seek unification with China as soon as possible; and there are others standing in between these two positions. Suppose the view that Taiwan should declare independence at once is at one extreme, represented by a score of 0, and the view that Taiwan should seek unification with China as soon as possible is at the other extreme, represented by a score of 10. What is your position on this issue using this scale?

Based on the 2001 survey conducted by the Taiwan Election and Democratization Studies (TEDS), 23.5 percent positioned themselves at 4 or less, 48.2 percent of the respondents chose the middle point 5, and 28.3 percent placed themselves at 6 or higher (see Figure 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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