Cross-Pressures, Opinion Expression, and Party Identification: Lessons of the 2008 Legislative Yuan Elections in Taiwan

This study examines whether people’s interpersonal relationship and social environments are important resources, which affect individuals’ opinion expressions. Different from the approaches such of “socio- demographic factors” and “political mobilization” in the existing literature on political participation, this study uses “cross-pressures” as its theoretical framework, analyzing the influence posed by cross-pressures on persons’ inclination to express their own political opinions in the 2008 Legislative Yuan elections. The cross-pressures might be especially salient when their political positions are different from those of their family members. We employ the 2008 Taiwan Election and Democratization Study(TEDS 2008) survey data, using “cross-tabulation analyses” and “multinomial logit models” to investigate the association between four-type respondents and political expressions. Note that the variable of “party identification” is employed as the proxy for tapping the concept of political expression. The findings reveal that the variables of gender, age, ethnicity, Taiwanese/ Chinese consciousness, unification/independence preference, cross- pressures, and four-type respondents are the significant factors associated with an individual’s expression of party identification, and most of them run in the expected directions. More importantly, some respondents refuse to express their real partisan preferences and therefore report themselves as “independents” during face-to-face interviews when they are under social interactions with cross-pressures. The results confirm the major hypothesis of this research: individuals having homogeneous social interactions and under low-level cross-pressures are predisposed to talk about politics, while people in cross-pressures involving greater political disagreement are less likely to express their political preferences.

Keywords: interpersonal network; cross-pressure; opinion expression; party identification

The paper can be downloaded here.