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There is widespread consensus on the theoretical foundations of the differing mandates hypothesis, that in mixed-member systems district legislators are more likely to defect from the party line than list legislators. However, the empirical evidence for this hypothesis is extremely weak. Is the hypothesis itself fundamentally flawed, or does the long list of intervening variables cited in the literature account for these weak results? This paper examines the differing mandates hypothesis in a case, Taiwan from 1993 to 2007, in which none of the proposed intervening variables should alter expectations. If the hypothesis is not supported in this baseline case, perhaps it should be discarded altogether. In fact, there is strong support for the hypothesis, indicating that the hypothesis is not fundamentally flawed, though it may be less robust than commonly believed.
