2024 Australasia Meeting, Melbourne, Australia: December, 2024
Impacts of Third-Party Entry to a Polarized Two-Party Political System: A Structural Analysis of Taiwan General Elections
Chao Ma
Using both vote and poll data and employing the micro-BLP framework, we estimate a discrete choice model to examine the impacts of third-party entry in the 2024 Taiwan presidential election. We find that such entry exacerbated political polarization because it strengthened the two major parties’ incentives to further polarize. First, a stronger competitor (third party) for central voters makes each major party’s effort to gain such voters less effective; second, central voters leaving a major party due to its further polarization now will not all switch to the other major party because they will be split by the third party. Welfare analyses show that the potential white-blue alliance would generate the highest social welfare because it retains the most centrist perceived ideological position and a large proportion of the third-party leader’s political valence.
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