序言 Preface
This book celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS). The ABS is an applied research program on public opinion toward political values, democracy and governance, and development across the region. This research project has four main objectives, including generating scientifically reliable and comparable data, strengthening intellectual capacity for democracy studies, disseminating survey results to the public, and advancing the research frontiers of the global study of democratization under the auspices of the Global Barometer Surveys (GBS).
In the last two decades, the ABS has conducted five rounds of surveys and published hundreds of articles and books exploring and explaining important intellectual puzzles. The ABS provided empirically grounded answers to the lingering authoritarian nostalgia among citizens in the region. It dispelled the myth that contextual factors in Asia, such as political culture and electoral politics, might mitigate the negative effects of corruption on political trust. Instead, it found a strong trust-eroding effect of political corruption in Asian democracies. There was also no evidence that contextual factors lessened the corruption-trust link in Asia. The ABS is also the pioneer in systematically analyzing the demand side dynamics in making sense of the growing popular disenchantment with democracy. Now, Covid-19 is creating a new kind of stress test. There is a demand—from policy actors, investors, journalists, researchers, and ordinary people themselves—for reliable information about popular political orientations and preferences as well as about how citizens evaluate the quality of democratic governance. The ABS’s mission is to assist practitioners and policy makers in identifying areas of weakness in the existing political system, which have helped inform policy elites at many U.S.-based and international NGOs and donor organizations.
The ABS has built a solid academic foundation over the years, and there is no better way to celebrate the accomplishments than with a commemorative volume containing important findings uncovered by our colleagues in the region and around the world. We also include chapters focusing on individual countries in order to compare and contrast specific dynamics affecting the future of democracy in the region. In the past two decades, the ABS has been made possible by the contributors of this volume. Furthermore, the ABS is indebted to government agencies and international organizations for funding this ever-expanding endeavor. Among the organizations that contributed to this project are the Ministries of Education and Science and Technology in Taiwan, the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica, the Henry Luce Foundation, the World Bank, and the UNDP. As well as commemorating the long-term collective efforts of those involved in the ABS in various forms, this edited volume also marks an important moment that will hopefully inspire the future generations who will work together under the auspices of ABS and GBS.