Abstract
The generational politics studies in have Taiwan seriously suffered from “age-period-cohort (APC) problems,” that is, mixed information, unstandardized measurement, and multi-collinearity problems, which lead to contradictory results. In this article, a Cross-Classified Random Effects Model (CCREM) is applied to mitigate the APC problems. It investigates the APC differences of the preferences on national identities and democratic values using a pooled dataset of national social surveys between 1995 and 2010. According to the CCREM results, the “age effect” shows that the younger age-groups have stronger Taiwanese identity and more politically liberal attitudes, but the statistical effect is not very significant. On the other hand, the “period effect” shows that after the democratic transition, the whole population has stronger Taiwanese identity and more politically liberal attitudes, and the statistical effect is significant and robust. Finally, the “cohort effect” is more important and complicated than the “age effect”.