| Abstract |
In a post-authoritarian society, how does its authoritarian nostalgia affect one’s preference for redistribution? In theory, the latter can be largely determined by one’s belief about historical economic narratives regarding his or her country’s model of economic success and redistributive regime. This paper studies how such a belief, when utilized as a political framing, can causally determine people’s preferences for how to best finance redistributive policies and which social sectors should foot the bill. Specifically, Taiwan is chosen as the case in focus. For one, despite the fact that Taiwan has experienced three political turnovers (2000, 2008, 2016), the historical economic narratives about the Asian economic miracle during its authoritarian past still loom large as a popular political rhetoric for electoral mobilization. The ideological legacy of the last authoritarian leader, Chiang Ching-kuo, prioritizes inclusive economic growth as a solution for redistribution, while a more aggressive approach has gradually gained momentum among younger voters. Taiwan’s political context therefore provides an appropriate opportunity for studying the causal effect of nostalgia-based political framing on individuals’ redistributive preferences. I conducted two sets of survey experiments in Taiwan to identify the causal effect of historical economic narratives as a political communication strategy. On the one hand, the first set of experiment tested if one’s economic beliefs about redistribution and growth were shaped by his or her basic knowledge about Taiwan’s economic history. On the other hand, to estimate both the effects of the nostalgia-based policy framing and the authoritarian nostalgia as a causal mechanism—the eliminated effect (Archarya et al., 2020)—, the second set included two conjoint experiments, both of which had six attributes of redistributive policies and one of them had one additional attribute of policy framing for inducing respondents’ authoritarian nostalgia. Based on the results from these two sets of experiments, I found those who held favorable historical memories for Chiang Ching-kuo’s economic legacy would be less likely to prefer the funding scheme that might hurt economic growth. |