This issue of Japanese Journal of Political Science is devoted to the fruits of the latest AsiaBarometer Survey that was completed in 2006. The AsiaBarometer is a regional survey project that focuses explicitly on the daily lives of ordinary people in Asia. The first three waves of the survey were carried out in more than 30 countries in East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia. The wave examined here is focused on seven societies that fall into the ‘Confucian’ zone of world politics: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Most of the comparative papers that constitute this journal were first presented at the AsiaBarometer Workshop and Open Symposium in Tokyo on 14 and 15 December 2006. A separate volume containing country profile chapters will appear at a later date.

In recent years, institutional financial institutions such as the World Bank have taken a keen interest in the links between governance and economic development in East Asia and in other regions of the world. However, the concept of governance has proven difficult to measure in cross-national studies and its meaning in the minds of citizens and experts may differ noticeably. This article examines elite and mass perceptions of governance using the World Governance Indicators developed by scholars affiliated with the World Bank and survey data derived from the 2006 wave of the AsiaBarometer Survey conducted in seven ‘Confucian’ societies. The results of the analysis capture considerable variation at the country and individual levels for how citizens and experts perceive governance in this region of the world. In addition, a multivariate test uncovered some convergence between citizen and expert assessments but only for some of the various governance components.

In this article, we attempt to describe how ordinary people in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan view democracy and its authoritarian alternatives and how they experience institutional practices of their democracies to determine the extent of cultural and institutional democratization. The analysis of the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey data shows that although the citizens of East Asian democracies unequivocally reject military authoritarian rule, they are ambivalent toward civilian authoritarian rule, and are not yet fully committed to democracy. The analysis also shows that they are not satisfied with the provision of civil rights and institutions of horizontal accountability, but remain highly satisfied with voting rights, which suggests that East Asian democracies are not adequately liberal, though unmistakably electoral, in the eyes of ordinary people. On the basis of this finding, we conclude that East Asian democracies fail to achieve a high-level equilibrium between the popular demand for democracy and the institutional supply of democracy.

Using the 2005 and 2006 AsiaBarometer surveys I analyze religiosity and secularization in Asia. I find that, in South Asia, identification with a particular religion is the norm and most people pray every day but, in East Asia, religious identification and religious practice are both much less common. Even in secular East Asia, however, the demand for religious services is high and belief in a spiritual world is common. I conclude that secularization does not necessarily produce uniformly secular societies. Turning to the causes and consequences of religiosity, I find surprisingly few significant relationships, results that echo similar analyses in Western Europe. I then discuss the implications of these non-findings.

Economic development and the social changes it brings are changing people's world views among the East Asia Confucian societies. Most notable is a change from stressing hard work and achievement toward stressing enjoyment, self expression, and a fulfilling lifestyle. With this people also have become more pro-equality and tolerant toward different ideas and styles. These newly emerged views of modernized societies can be called ‘postmodern’ values. People with stronger postmodern values are more active politically, more assertive in demanding individual and political rights, and more emphatic in their preference for democratic government. The implication is that people in East Asia will demand more democracy as economic development proceeds and as they acquire these postmodern values.

This paper explores the common and different cultural globalization experience of the public's everyday lifestyles in seven societies in Asia-Pacific, focusing on the following aspects: connectivity with the world through personal encounters and digital media, English language capacity, support for the forces of globalization, global thinking and concern, the Internet's influences on sociopolitical opinions, appreciation of international food, and national vs. transnational identity. An analysis of survey data is used to contrast public experience of global thinking, global exposure, global diet, and global feelings in two separate developmental states with higher and lower HDI measures in seven Asia-Pacific societies. We demonstrate that individual globalization manifested in everyday life should be understood under a comparative societal perspective as citizens' global experiences are not only a simple matter of personal choice, but are also more a reflection of complex societal conditions.

This article examines the cross-level causal relationship between macro-political settings and micro-political attitudes in eleven Asian societies using the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey (China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan) and the 2006 South Asian Survey (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). After extracting the four underlying dimensions of political attitudes from the broadly comparable questions used in the two surveys, the study first detects national differences in terms of (1) citizens' attitudes toward political activities other than voting, (2) their commitment to a democratic system, (3) their political frustration, and (4) their confidence in their ability to govern themselves. Then, regression analysis examines the possibility that the micro-level variations in each of the four dimensions of political attitudes are related to the abundant macro-level variations found in these Asian countries. The results show that although the country-level predictors for citizens' attitudes toward direct political actions are common to both regions (ethno-linguistic fractionalization and the degree of institutionalization of preference articulation), factors influencing the variations in other dimensions are different. Specifically, the effects of political competitiveness and inclusiveness are more salient in South Asia than in East Asia.

This paper tests the hypotheses that the tide of globalization undermines or reinforces the traditional types of social capital. Using the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey data and applying two-level logit regression analysis, this paper found that social capital related to sense of trust or human nature and interpersonal relations can be augmented by globalization, while social capital regarding familialism and mindfulness can be weakened.

The AsiaBarometer Survey questionnaire of 2006 focuses on the daily lives of ordinary people in Asia. The idea behind this project is that without knowing at least some aspects of people's daily lives, it would be less productive to register the array of social scientist's concerns about their norms, values, identities, beliefs, and their relationships to societal and political action. Furthermore, in order to carry out any comparative and cross-national analysis in Asia, the questions must be able to be answered in the first place. Such topics as economic conditions, political institutions, and public policy do not constitute the core of their life. To ordinary people, matters of daily life are more important and easier to answer than those questions that the scientists are interested in. Asia is a region of full of diversity and is changing fast. There is no other region in the world that is more diverse and fast changing. By looking at the daily lives of ordinary people we are able to perceive and assess ordinary people's concerns, including in relationship to the larger social entities such as patriotism and confidence in government performance (Inoguchi, 2004).