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.
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.
This article examines how gender quotas reshape political selection and substantive representation, advancing a supply-side theory of quota effects and challenging the placeholder view of dynastic women. Using a regression discontinuity design exploiting population-based quota thresholds in Taiwan's local council elections, I show that quota implementation increases women's descriptive representation while raising the dynastic share of elected councilors. This reflects strategic party adaptation to supply constraints. When competitive women candidates are scarce, parties draw disproportionately from women with family ties. Prior research suggests dynastic women may prioritize family interests over independent advocacy, potentially weakening substantive representation. Yet quota-induced dynastic entry does not undermine it. Districts exposed to quotas produce significantly more women-related bills and speeches, and dynastic status does not attenuate women's legislative engagement. These findings suggest that quota effects depend not only on institutional design but on the pre-existing structure of candidate supply.
Electoral institutions are known to shape strategic voting, yet most evidence comes from parliamentary democracies. Whether the same logic applies outside parliamentary systems remains less well understood. This study examines how electoral reform affected strategic voting in Taiwan, a semi-presidential democracy. In 2008, Taiwan changed its parliamentary electoral system from multi-member to single-member districts, while local council elections remained under multi-member rules. Exploiting this reform in a difference-in-differences design and supplementing the analysis with individual-level survey evidence, I find a significant rise in strategic voting following the reform. This effect is stronger in districts with larger seat reductions, greater electoral competitiveness, and prior minor-party presence. Survey evidence further shows that supporters of minor parties were more likely to vote strategically or shift their party identification. Overall, the evidence suggests that behavioral change was driven more by voters than by parties, and that adjustment occurred rapidly following the institutional change.
This study examines how spatially differentiated colonial administrations generate durable political effects that persist across regime changes. I argue that variations in colonial state capacity can produce enduring patterns of political compliance that are subsequently inherited by successor regimes. Drawing on the case of Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, I analyze a dual administrative system that governed Indigenous and Han populations separately, subjecting the former to intensive policing and educational penetration. The analysis reveals that villages formerly administered under the Banjin system exhibit both short- and long-term effects. In the short term, these villages recorded significantly higher school enrollment rates during the colonial period. In the long term, they continued to display markedly greater electoral support for the Kuomintang, Taiwan's long-ruling authoritarian party, even decades after democratization. These effects remain robust after controlling for contemporary socioeconomic conditions and cannot be attributed solely to ethnic bloc voting behavior.
What motivates legislators to support industrial policy in a polarized US Congress? This paper examines legislative behavior and firm lobbying strategies surrounding the CHIPS and Science Act. We argue that political investment intensifies under a specific structural condition: when large policy rents are guaranteed to exist but their allocation across firms remains uncertain. Using a difference-in-differences event study design, we compare lobbying trajectories between Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) member firms and other electronics-sector firms following 2020, exploiting variation in expected exposure to CHIPS subsidies. We show that treated firms significantly increased lobbying after the legislative process began, and that greater pre-passage lobbying intensity predicts larger subsequent subsidy allocations. We further document that semiconductor firms strategically targeted contributions toward legislators representing districts with pre-existing semiconductor manufacturing capacity. This geographic targeting proves strong enough to attenuate partisan constraints, fostering bipartisan support even under conditions of intense polarization. These findings demonstrate how anticipated distributive gains and lobbying incentives jointly shape both firm behavior and legislative coalitions, linking firm expectations of subsidy access to congressional voting patterns before allocation decisions are made.