TEDS has achieved much since 2000. There are four major goals that the TEDS will work toward in the future:
1). Carrying out yearly large-scale face-to-face interviews
It is a top priority for the TEDS to conduct research every year since the TEDS provides students of political science and social science in Taiwan or international community with valuable training and information. When electoral competition is fierce and political mobilization is high, electoral voting behavior is worth examining. However, it is also important to examine mass attitudes toward political systems and the development of democratiz ation, political socialization, changes in political values, government legitimacy, democratic governance , satisfaction with government performance, political attitudes, and the issue of unification versus independence during non-campaign periods. In particular, the total number of seats in the Legislative Yuan was reduced from 225 to 113 for the 7th Legislature. The electoral system has been changed from a Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) system to a mixed system . The debates on constitutional reforms (including the electoral reform of legislative elections) and its political consequences will profoundly affect Taiwan. The se changes deserve the attention of students in political science and are best studied through long-term research projects. There is little doubt that this research will help us to understand mass political attitudes. Thus, the projects that will be conducted in the following four years are:
TEDS209M: Face-to-face interviews after the 2009 County Magistrate and City Mayoral Elections
TEDS2010C: Face-to-face interviews after the 2010 Taipei City, Taichung City,and Kaohsiung City Mayoral Elections
TEDS20012L: Face-to-face interviews after the 2012 Legislative Elections
TEDS2012P: Face-to-face interviews after the 2012 Presidential Election
2). Establishing the TEDS as a permanent institute
Until now, all TEDS projects have been conducted by an appointed chair and an executive board, and different universities have taken turns to coordinate projects. This mechanism aims to maintain a division of labor in different stages and sustain cooperation. However, this style of operation may raise problems in the future as personnel change, interaction among universities needs to be coordinated, research experience is passed along, and longitudinal data collection continues.? In order to ensure the quality of execution (such as supervisors or interviewees?trainings), to promote the continuity of projects, and to maintain relations with the international community, the TEDS will make efforts to establish itself as a permanent institute.
3). Organiz ing workshops for survey research methods
Any sustainable organization must invest in its members?training and recruitment. Thus, training young scholars and students is very important for the future of survey research, especially survey research which prioritizes systematic data collection and data analysis. The TEDS committee, therefore, will increase training in survey methods. These specific measures will put related institutes together to plan several training classes, such as a ‘workshop for quantitative method in political science?and a ‘workshop for social science methods? In the long run, the TEDS committee hopes to have classes in survey research and quantitative analysis which are similar to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, ICPSR at the University of Michigan in the States or the Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis and Collection at the University of Essex in UK.
4). Continuing interactions with international academic communities
TEDS has already put some questionnaires from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) into its core questionnaire in order to bridge domestic and international research. The coordinator of TEDS, Chi Huang, attended the CSES conferences held in Stockholm, Sweden in October 2003 and Washington, USA in August 2005, and discussed the achievements of the TEDS and its connection with CSES. Meanwhile, the TEDS committee also authoriz ed I-Chou Liu, the ex-director of Election Study Center (ESC) at National Cheng-chi University, and Ching-Hsin Yu, the ESC’s current director, to foster cooperation with the Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP) in 2004. This was completed successfully and the core questionnaires of CNEP were included in the questionnaire of the 2004 Legislative election. In the future , TEDS will continue to work to improve cooperation and interaction with other international academic communities and enable local researchers in Taiwan to play an important role in international academia.
