Scholars still do not reach any agreement on whether domestic elections
will lead to a conflictual foreign policy or a peaceful one. From 1996 to 2008,
Taiwan tended to act conflictually toward Mainland China during the period
ahead of presidential elections. However, the results of descriptive statistics in
this article finds that this pattern did not occur in Taiwan’s 2012 presidential
election. This article attempts to apply a three-level-of-analysis framework, i.e.
“the international level,” “the domestic level,” and “the individual level,” to
explain why both candidates from Taiwan’s two major political parties
proposed peaceful China policies in their campaigns. Through the analysis of
qualitative data collected from interviews and documents, this paper argues that
although the two presidential candidates’ China-policy making were restrained
by the attitudes of the United States and China at the international level, as well
as the public opinion of “maintaining the status quo” and the two candidates’
roles as the “re-election seeker” and the “challenger” respectively at the
domestic level, the most important factors that drove the two candidates’
peaceful China policy were ideology and personality at the individual level.
This explanation also contributes to the previous literature which only
emphasizes the factors of public opinion and leaders’ term limits.