Using repeated cross-sectional surveys to study political attitudes and behavior in a new democracy: HAPC models for Taiwan

The political socialization literature attributes the formation of public political attitudes in mature democracies to varying mixtures of life-cycle processes, generational experiences and period effects. In the absence of long-term, individual-level panel data, delineating these effects has been a longstanding problem. Building on path-breaking work by Yang and Land, recent research has utilized multi-level analyses of repeated cross-sectional survey data sets to estimate life-cycle, generational and period effects in several Western countries. Employing data from national election surveys conducted over the past decade by the TEDS project, this paper uses the Yang-Land methodology to conduct illustrative analyses of age cohort and period effects on political attitudes and behavior in a new Asian democracy, Taiwan. Analyses of KMT partisanship show a significant generational component, and analyses of political efficacy, political interest and electoral turnout suggest that inferences about age cohort and period effects can depend on how individual-level age effects are specified.