Political trust reflects people’s evaluative orientation toward the polity and is thus vital to regime stability. Based on data drawn from a cross-national social survey, this article examines the level of political trust in six Asian societies and the possible effects of a series of institutional and cultural factors on political trust. It finds that institutional factors, particularly the economic and political performance of government, are powerful determinants of political trust, whereas the effects of such cultural factors as post-materialism, traditionalism, and authoritarianism are either insignificant or weak. The superiority of the institutional approach over the cultural approach is reconfirmed.

Political trust is a cornerstone of political survival and development. This paper makes use of data from the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey to examine the level of political trust in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It finds that the people of Hong Kong have a high level of trust in their government and judiciary, but a relatively low level of trust in their legislature. In contrast, the Taiwan people have a lower level of trust in all of their executive, judicial, and legislative branches, reflecting a serious problem with political confidence in Taiwan. A further analysis shows that institutional factors such as ratings of government performance, life satisfaction, and satisfaction with democratic rights and freedoms, and cultural factors such as interpersonal trust, post-materialism, and traditionalism have varying degrees of effect on the different domains of political trust in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but institutional factors appear to be more powerful than cultural factors in explaining the experiences of both societies.

This article, which is based on a comparative survey conducted in late 2014, explores public opinion in Taiwan and Hong Kong on the Sunflower and Umbrella movements. We find that public support for the local movement in each place was almost equally divided. As for the other movement, the supporters outnumbered opponents. The basic patterns of the relationship between socio-demographic attributes, political attitudes, as well as the evaluation of the “China impact”, and public support for the two movements were consistent in both societies. Those most likely to support the Sunflower and Umbrella movements were: the young; Minnanese, Hakka, or Hong Kong-born people; those who support the “Pan-Green” or “Pan-democracy” camps; those who agreed that democracy is the best political system; those who had a negative view of the “China impact”, especially its harmful influence on local democracy. Notwithstanding these similarities, in Taiwan, support for the Sunflower Movement was mainly divided by ethnic group and for the Umbrella Movement by gender; while in Hong Kong, support for both movements was largely divided by age, and the perceived “China impact” on local economic growth had no independent effects.

This article, which is based on a comparative telephone survey conducted in 2016, examines the relationship between social mobility experience and the life satisfaction of people aged 18 to 35 in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Using both objective and subjective measures of social mobility, we found that young people’s perceptions of their own social mobility and that of the entire youth population correlated positively with life satisfaction. However, the objective upward experiences of intragenerational and intergenerational mobility did not have a significant effect on life satisfaction. In addition, the objective upward experiences of individuals were found to be uncorrelated with the perceptions of their own social mobility and that of the entire youth population. These findings suggest that young people will not become more satisfied even if they themselves have actually experienced upward mobility, because their positive perception of social mobility depends on whether they can move upward to their desired status. It is the expected social mobility and the competence to achieve rather than the actual past mobility experience that could affect the life satisfaction of the young generation in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Globalization has led to a redefinition of the functions and roles of the state. Based on data drawn from a cross-national social survey, this article examines the influences of globalization on the public's attitudes towards their state in Australia, China, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States, by focusing on satisfaction with government performance and demands on the government. The six countries differ extensively in their sociopolitical and technological situations, as well as in the experiences of their people with globalization in terms of the following aspects: connectivity with the world through personal ties and digital means, English language capacity, and support for the forces of globalization. There are also huge disparities in the public rankings of government performance and demands for expanding government spending in a wide range of policy areas. Our analysis reveals that, although both intra-and inter-country variations in the influences of globalization on public attitudes towards the state are not particularly prominent, those who support globalization not only are more inclined than others to be satisfied with the government's performance, but also demand more government intervention. Globalization and its consequences on public attitudesSince the concept of 'globalization' burst onto the field of social sciences in the 1990s, there has been increasing discussion about the consequences of globalization for the state, including debates over such topics as how globalization affects sovereign autonomy (Hardt and Negri