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Tso-Jung Yen

2012-12-14
12:30:00 - 14:30:00

103 , Mathematics Research Center Building (ori. New Math. Bldg.)

In modern electoral politics, firms tend to donate money to candidates who are capable of solving conflicts in fields that the firms have interests in. When a firm donates money to a candidate, a tie between the firm and the candidate is established. Sociologists have long been interested in what contributes to the formation of the donation-related tie between a firm and a candidate, and how the tie formation is influenced by the social networks in which the firm is embedded. In this paper we investigate these issues by analyzing campaign contribution records in the 2008 Taiwanese legislative election. To identify mechanisms behind the donation-related tie formation, we adopt a joint modelling approach, which, on one hand, allows us to model tie occurrences and tie strengths separately with different sets of covariates. On the other hand, it allows us to model dependence between the tie occurrences and tie strengths via a specified latent association mechanism. To estimate the model, we provide a full Bayesian framework, using MCMC methods to generate samples for posterior inference. The results show that the occurrence of a donation-related tie between a firm and a candidates is strongly influenced by the the social networks that the firm is embedded in. However, the amount of money given by a firm to a candidates is mainly determined by firm-related attributes such as the asset size of the firm and the location of the firm (This is a joint work with Dr. Zon-Rong Lee, Liang-Cheng Huang and Professor Jing-Shiang Hwang).