Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Elites Volatility after Regime Turnover.

The result of the 2000 presidential election ended the KMT’ dominant rule of Taiwan and marked the first regime turnover in more than five decades. Such a drastic power rotation certainly prompted a wave of elite mobility and replacement of a large scale in Taiwanese politics. It is thus interesting to investigate how the first regime turnover affected the mobility of the old regime’s elite and how the new government reshuffled and replaced the personnel in the executive branch. This paper extends Albert Hirshman’s (1978) concepts in "Exit, Voice and Loyalty" to the study of elite mobility after regime turnover. We sort out five attributes at the individual level, including sex, age, ethnicity, as well as one’s ranking and sector in the former regime, as independent variables, whereas exit, voice, and loyalty constitute three dependent variables. We propose a set of hypothesis that is to be tested against the data we collected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]