Abstract
The study used county-level panel data in Taiwan from 1993 to 2015 to investigate: could land development improve the probability of ruling elites' political survival? Through the fixed effects regression model examination, we found that (1) comparing to county mayors from Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), mayors from Kuomintang (KMT) inclined to launch land development and stimulate real estate development through housing, and pro-capital spatial development policies; mayors from DPP, contrarily, induced non-housing spatial policies such as industrial development more often; and that (2) both candidates from two political parties got more votes due to their land and spatial developments. We, thus, pointed out the logic of political survival was the main mechanism to explain how the land and spaces were developed in Taiwan after WWII; land and spatial developments were the policies that the political elite manipulated to build their winning coalitions and to maximize the probability of political survival.