Regional Dominance and Strategic Non-Alignment: A Multi-Tier Theory of Candidate Alignment in Taiwan, 1994–2024

Abstract

This article revisits the assumption that local candidates align with nationally dominant parties to secure resources for their regions and advance their political careers. We propose a multi-tier theory of candidate alignment in unitary systems that foregrounds the strategic importance of regionally dominant parties and specifies the conditions under which candidates reject alignment altogether. Local candidates are more likely to align with regionally dominant parties than nationally dominant parties, except when representing cohesive constituencies which strongly oppose the regional ruling party. In these settings, opposition candidates opt for independent non-alignment as a partisan hedging strategy rather than as fatigue with party polarization. We evaluate these claims with an original dataset of 8,998 regional legislative candidates in Taiwan between 1994 and 2024. Multinomial logistic regression analysis reveals that Taiwan’s non-indigenous candidates consistently align with regionally dominant parties, whereas indigenous candidates avoid aligning with the Democratic Progressive Party, preferring independent non-alignment when it is regionally dominant.