Political Communication: Taiwan Election Study

Under the competitive electoral democracy system of Taiwan, democratic politics will inevitably become media politics where all kinds of politics are communication. The nature of political parties, the characters of candidates and the evaluation of policy addresses can all influence the voters exposed to them while most of the voters believe that they make their choices based on political views and are able to consider the policy platform proposed by the candidate and the content of propaganda objectively as a reference to voting. In addition, national identity, tendency of identifying with unification-independence and preference for certain political party will not only selectively expose, understand and memorize the media leaning toward unification or independence, but also have a high correlation with the voting. During the election, interpersonal communication and organizational communication can only have a very limited coverage. Thus, drawing support from the powerful broadcast capability of mass communication and media communication to convey political messages to voters is necessary. Among all kinds of media, the political communication of TV media is still the most effectual; However, Taiwan voters have especially strong subjective consciousness in politics and majority takes it for granted that they will not be influenced by media communication and organizational communication.In the political communication of Taiwan election, new media penetration is still not high. Among young voters in their twenties, the high utilizers of new media mostly wait and see rather than take action. There is still some distance to go from netizens to citizens. Analyzing the context effect of traditional media and new media in political communication from a SWOT analysis suggests complementary advantages, co-creating the niche policy of integration of omnimedia, so as to maximize individual’s oral features and the contact with voters who have political identity, bringing into play the synergy effect.The establishment of convergence theory in Taiwan’s political communication suggests that the cognition of experts, political elites and election operators is different from that of general public and voters. This may be the inevitable result of the iron law of oligarchy. But if we go a step further to induce and deduce it, we can still deconstruct that although Taiwan has undergone five leadership elections and the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party have been learning from each other and been in power in turn, and when the two parties face national identity, identity with unification-independence and political parties, the stabilizing structure of voters and when they enlist the support of swing voters who identify with Taiwan and are willing to maintain the status quo, the contents, methods and effects of the two parties’ political communication in elections converge, their essence and nature, ideologies and individual subjective interpretations are still different.