Sun, Jul 31, 2016 page3

• Tsai’s dissatisfaction rate rises in poll

  CRITICAL MASS: The reason for the dip in Tsai’s approval rating is that more people have switched their stance from ‘neutral’ to ‘dissatisfied,’ a polling company representative said

  • By Loa Iok-sin / Staff Reporter
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  Results of a survey yesterday showed that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) approval rating has dropped slightly, while her dissatisfaction rating went up by more than 10 percentage points over the past two months.

  According to the poll conducted by Taiwan Thinktank, Tsai’s approval rating fell to 49.1 percent from 52.4 percent found in the previous poll that the group conducted two weeks after Tsai took office on May 20, while her disapproval rating increased by 13.5 percentage points to 36 percent.

  The percentage of people holding a “neutral” view on Tsai fell from 35.1 percent in the June 3 survey to 14.9 percent.

  “Some people might interpret the results as a decline in Tsai’s approval rating, but if you look closely, the change in the approval rating is minimal, and the disapproval rating increasing sharply in the past two months might be due to people who initially held a neutral view of Tsai now being dissatisfied,” Taiwan Thinktank deputy executive director Lai I-chung (賴怡忠) told a news conference.

  He said that 78.7 percent of the respondents who identified themselves as Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) supporters said they are not satisfied with Tsai’s performance, while 72.4 percent of those who identified themselves as Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) supporters approved of her performance.

  New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said the passage of the Act Governing the Handling of Ill-gotten Properties by Political Parties and Their Affiliate Organizations (政黨及其附隨組織不當取得財產處理條例) on Monday might have caused the polarization.

  The poll showed that while 53.9 percent of the public believes that the bill on ill-gotten party assets is an important step in achieving transitional justice, a breakdown of the respondents’ political affiliations showed that 59.9 percent of the respondents who identified themselves as KMT supporters believe it to be a political purge against the KMT, Hsu said.

  However, 78.4 percent of DPP supporters said it was a move toward transitional justice, while 14.3 percent of DPP supporters said it was a political purge against the KMT.

  When asked about political affiliations, 29.2 percent of the respondents said they support the DPP, 17.5 percent said they support the KMT and 16 percent of the respondents said they support the NPP.

  “We are pleased to see that the support rating for the NPP has remained more or less stable — and even grew — in the past two months according to Taiwan Thinktank’s findings, while the support for the DPP has dropped during the same period,” Hsu said. “As we are often called the ‘small green,’ with the DPP being the ‘big green,’ the result shows we are able to have some differentiation from the DPP.”

  The telephone survey collected 1,078 valid samples randomly selected by telephone on Tuesday and Wednesday.
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