The study of public opinion toward the police in Taiwan has not, heretofore, included comparative research. The current study fills this void in the literature by analyzing the data from the World Values Surveys. It was found that Taiwanese confidence in the police was reasonably good for a society experiencing democratic transition. Although lower than many more mature democratic societies such as Finland and the USA, confidence in the police is among the top one-third of fifty countries and is significantly higher than those found in other Asian and European countries that also experienced democratic transition. Further regression analyses of data from the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan indicated that the differences between those three countries are substantive and cannot be explained away after the demographic social and attitudinal variables have been controlled.Keywords Confidence in the police . Cross-national public opinions . Democratic policing . Police in Korea, Philippines, and TaiwanSince the beginning of democratic transition, public polls have become one of the dominant social forces in Taiwan. Periodically, all major aspects of political life, including the police, are reflected in these polls. Academics have also paid more attention to public opinion (Tsai and Yang

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This study comparatively examines three major models of citizens' satisfaction with the police, using two similar community surveys on policing from Cincinnati, Ohio, USA and Queensland, Australia. It tests the wider applicability of the demographic model, the neighborhood condition model, and the prior contacts with police model and analyzes whether the effects of common determinants on citizens' satisfaction remain the same across the two international samples. Results from a series of comparisons show that there is a substantial amount of similarity across statistical models for Cincinnati and Queensland, suggesting a general framework of citizens' satisfaction with the police that could be generalized to other international contexts. Limitations and future directions of comparative research in this area are also discussed.

Recent literature on policing in the People's Republic of China, though very limited, has encompassed a wide range of topics including police organizations, roles and functions, subculture, policing strategies (such as community policing, campaign style policing, and the comprehensive management approach), and a number of issues and problems (such as abuse of power, accountability, and police citizen relations). These studies serve to establish a foundation for a better understanding of the complex social control in China. The present study summarizes the findings of recent research, identifies its limitations, and discusses the directions and challenges in future research.