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This is a book on Taiwan's efforts to consolidate democracy after its first alternation of government in 2000. Unlike most books on Taiwan's democracy, it adopts an "attitudinal" approach to assessing what and how socio-political values affect its prospects for consolidation. The authors build on Seymour Lipset, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's assumption that mass democratic support and cultural values are critical in facilitating democratic consolidation. The tide is a misnomer, as it is not a study of regime transformation; rather, it is a collection of works on the attitudes and support for democratic principles and practices during Chen Shui-Bian's administration. Funded by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, the book consists of twelve uneven chapters by distinguished Taiwan scholars who utilize public opinion data, such as Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study and World Values Survey, to test and validate its hypotheses. Like most new democracies, Taiwan faces many challenges in regime consolidation, such as the constraints of an authoritarian past, a traditional culture, sub-etiinic cleavage, geo-strategic vulnerability and non-majoritarian electoral institutions. To begin with, John Hsieh addresses the important question of how sub-ethnic division frames its politics in Taiwanese society. Hsieh argues that while the ethnic identity politics propelled democratization in the 1970s and 1980s, they now complicate policy making, especially with Mainland China. China's persistent military threat leads Steven Chan and Emerson Niou to focus on Taiwan's ambiguous international status and the citizens' views of independence and reunification. While Chan finds no incongruence in the cultural and political attitudes toward democracy on both sides of Taiwan strait, signifying hope for peaceful reunification, Niou shows that China's carrot-and-stick policy has been successful in shaping Taiwanese preference for independence. Turning to the impact of Confucianis