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

Karl Ho, Dennis Lu-Chung Weng, Harold D. Clarke

• 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.