Electoral Defeat, Political Polarization and Endogenous Time Horizon

• In Event: Polarization and Fear in Comparative Politics

Abstract

It’s been widely argued that political polarization is more likely to be on the rise during a crisis. Especially, since people’s time horizon is substantially shortened due to a crisis, they become more impatient with reaching across the aisle to find a consensus and less tolerant of dissenting voices. As individual time preferences are often treated as a constant in most analyses, this empirical study tries to endogenize them to a crisis by tapping into Taiwan’s 2024 presidential election, which had been said to be a choice between peace and war. Specifically, using a difference-in-differences approach and two surveys conducted right before and after the election as a natural experiment, this election is essentially a random assignment mechanism between treatment (losers) and control groups (winners). Since the presidential candidate of the incumbent party (Democratic Progressive Party) won the election, its supporters (based on our pre-election measure) are naturally designated as the control group, while the supporters of the others (e.g., Kuomintang and Taiwan People Party) who experienced the electoral defeat are the treatment group. We found significant average treatment effects through different measures such as respondents’ beliefs in the likelihood and timing of the military conflicts across the Taiwan strait and China’s economic sanctions on Taiwan. These results empirically verify the endogenous time preference hypothesis. Losers of the election indeed had a shorter time horizon vis-a-vis winners. Moreover, we also found empirical evidence that respondents’ preferred policy responses to this potential crisis across the Taiwan strait were more polarized after the election.

Authors

• Hans Hanpu Tung, National Taiwan University

• Chelsea C. Chou, National Taiwan University