The Study Of Political Culture In Taiwan During The Political Transformation (2001-2010)

Taiwan began its political transformation from mid-and-late1980s. This political transformation had close connection with Taiwan’s political culture transition. They influence each other.From1987to2000, Taiwan society showed a characteristic of political liberalization and democratization, booming social activities and deviating one-China Policy. After the first party rotation in2000, it showed a new characteristic of serious political conflict; distortion and desalination of Taiwan consciousness, democratization with achievement and predicament, politics more like entertainment and show, people focus more on economy. So the important issues in Taiwan’s political culture from2001-2010were Taiwan people’s self-identity, democratic attitude, capability of knowing and participating politics and policy bias.In the frame of three aspects-system culture, process culture and policy culture, according to social survey data of Taiwan University’s Democracy Research Program of East Asia, this paper gives the individual analysis to these important questions of Taiwan politics and culture. We can find that on the aspect of system culture, Taiwan enjoys the better legitimate foundation as a political community. The support to the democracy is merely qualified. There’s no sufficient foundation in legitimacy of political organization in the system. While analyzing these phenomena of social structure, the language didn’t influence the support to community steadily. Highly educated people tend to support democratic system, but probably go the other way. For system culture, the higher people are educated, the more probably they consider themselves having the ability of political participation. But in general, most Taiwan people don’t think they have this ability, currently lacking of confidence in their potential political influence. On political culture, Taiwan people have strong preference on economics. The analyzing result also added a good explanation to the attitude of Taiwanese to democratic system, which means Taiwan people have strong instrumental preference to the support to democracy.The features that Taiwan’s political culture showed between2001and2010brought both risks and opportunities to the Cross-Straits Relations. It’s necessary to put Taiwan people’s identification problems on the first place. But also we should watch out for their instrumental preference in the Cross-Straits Relations.