摘要
族群與認同是台灣近年來的政治上重要的議題，本文由族群與認同的理論出發，探究所謂的「台灣認同」的內涵，並據此發展「台灣意識」指標，用以測量認同因素在過去四次總統大選中的作用。研究結果發現：台灣意識有逐年增加的情況，2008年總統選舉後的調查資料的分析結果，已有54.7%的民眾，可以被歸類爲高台灣意識者；而在四次總統直選中，不同程度的台灣意識者，投票行爲的確有所不同，也有二極化的情況，台灣意識高者，顯著地較支持泛綠候選人，台灣意識較低者，顯著地較支持泛藍候選人；至於不同政黨候選人的支持基礎也有明顯的差異，泛綠候選人的支持，大部分都來自高台灣意識的民眾，且有逐漸增高的傾向，而高台灣意識者對泛藍候選人的支持比例，則顯著地偏低。分析的結果也指出，「政黨偏好」的解釋力比台灣意識佳，但台灣意識仍是一個具有相當解釋力的指標。同時，本文也發現，在控制其他變數之後，省籍的作用在過去四次總統選舉中並不顯著，因而台灣的認同問題，省籍應該不再是主要因素，而是意識型態上的差異。
並列摘要
Ethnic and identity problems are important issues in modern Taiwanese politics. This paper examines Taiwanese identity from the aspect of ethnic and identity theory. The author develops a ”Taiwanese consciousness” index to explore the effect of identity in the past four presidential elections. The results show that Taiwanese consciousness has increased year by year, with more than half (54.7%) of Taiwan voters now classified into the high level of Taiwanese consciousness. The data also show that people with different degrees of Taiwanese consciousness vote differently and are increasingly polarized around identity. People with high-level Taiwanese consciousness tend to vote for pan-green candidates, while people with lowlevel Taiwanese consciousness tend to vote for pan-blue candidates. The data also indicate that the support bases of different parties are quite different. Votes for pan-green candidates mostly come from people with high-level Taiwanese consciousness, and this fraction has steadily increased; at the same time, support for pan-blue candidates has fallen significantly among this group. The analysis shows that partisan identification performs better than the ”Taiwanese consciousness” index at predicting vote choice, but the ”Taiwanese consciousness” index still has additional explanatory power. This paper also finds that the effect of ”sengi” (voters' provincial background) is not significant in the four presidential elections after controlling for other variables. This result suggests that the identity issue in Taiwan is now more an expression of ideological differences than ethnic ones.