My dissertation, Designing Democracy: How Institutions Shape Political Behavior and Representation in Taiwan, uses the Taiwanese case to inform and refine broader theoretical debates about the role of institutions in democratic politics. Over the past century, Taiwan has experienced a series of institutional changes, including electoral reforms and administrative district reconfigurations. These institutional experiments provide a distinctive setting for testing general theories about how rules shape strategic behavior and political representation.
The dissertation shows that institutional incentives influence parties and individual politicians in systematic and predictable ways, and that these responses accumulate over time into durable patterns of representation. I trace the full pathway from institutional inducements to behavioral adaptation and, ultimately, to representational outcomes. Across the papers, I identify who adapts to institutional rules, how they adapt, and how long these changes persist.
Beyond testing predicted effects, the dissertation also examines how institutional changes generate differential consequences for specific demographic groups, including political families and Indigenous communities. By uncovering these mechanisms, the project helps explain why institutions can have uneven effects across groups and highlights outcomes that are often unanticipated in existing theories. Centered on causal inference and drawing on a range of statistical methods, the dissertation provides robust evidence for these arguments and motivates further research into the mechanisms linking institutions to political behavior and representation.
What are the consequences of gender quotas? This paper investigates the descriptive and substantive impact of Taiwan's gender quota rule in local council elections. The findings show that the quotas not only increased women's descriptive representation but also elevated the presence of dynastic politicians. Leveraging a regression discontinuity design based on the quota thresholds, I provide causal evidence of these shifts in representation. The interplay between a candidate-centered electoral system and a one-quarter gender quota has improved the electoral viability of dynastic candidates and motivated major parties to recruit from political families, thereby reinforcing their dominance in local politics. In addition, I find that gender quotas enhance substantive representation even when they benefit political groups traditionally perceived as disengaged from women's issues. The growing number of legislative speeches and bill proposals on women's issues suggests a shift toward a greater focus on women's issues in policymaking.
How do members of Congress secure influential committee assignments or leadership roles? While scholars have extensively examined the determinants of congressional advancement, the role of financial contributions to party organizations—what we term a “party tax”—has received comparatively limited recent attention. We revisit this mechanism using new data and updated empirical approaches, treating member contributions as indicators of willingness and capacity to advance party goals. Our findings show that such contributions are particularly consequential for members occupying elite committee and leadership positions, consistent with theories emphasizing the concentration of institutional power. We further find asymmetric influences across parties, with stronger effects among Republicans. Addressing causal concerns, we apply coarsened exact matching, showing that members ascending to more powerful positions subsequently increase their party contributions–reinforcing a feedback loop where financial supporters are rewarded with desirable placements. Collectively, our results underscore a strategic process by which monetary contributions facilitate access to institutional power and deepen partisan resource flows.
Existing research shows that institutions shape strategic voting, yet most evidence comes from parliamentary democracies. Other types of democracies remain less explored. This study investigates the causal impact of institutional change on strategic voting in Taiwan, a semi-presidential democracy, using a within-country research design. In 2008, Taiwan shifted from a multi-member to a single-member district system for parliamentary elections, while the rules for local council elections remained unchanged. Leveraging this institutional change, I implement a difference-in-differences framework, supplemented by individual-level survey evidence to assess strategic voting under different electoral rules. The results reveal a significant rise in strategic voting following the reform, particularly in districts that experienced larger seat reductions. Survey data further indicate that supporters of minor parties were especially likely to vote strategically or change their party identification. These behavioral shifts appear to be driven primarily by voters rather than by parties, suggesting that individuals responded quickly and adaptively to the new electoral incentives.
This study examines how spatially differentiated colonial administrations generate durable political effects that persist across regime changes. We argue that variations in colonial state capacity can produce enduring patterns of political compliance that are subsequently inherited by successor regimes. We test this argument using evidence from Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, where the state implemented a dual administrative system that separated Indigenous and Han populations and imposed intensive policing and education in Indigenous regions. The analysis shows that villages formerly governed under the Banjin system exhibit both short- and long-term effects: they experienced higher school enrollment during the colonial period and displayed significantly greater electoral support for Taiwan’s long-standing authoritarian ruling party, the Kuomintang, decades after democratization. These effects persisted even after accounting for contemporary socioeconomic conditions and could not be explained solely by ethnic bloc voting patterns.