Social Trust in Japan and Taiwan: A Test of Fukuyama’s Thesis

Abstract

Beginning around 1980, a new wave of theoretical concern with trust emerged (Sztompka 2001). This was a response to two things: the perception that social and political trust are in decline, and the argument that trust is essential to a good society (Levi 2001). The profusion of recent studies of trust contains a variety of methodologies, ranging from psychological approaches to trust as a personality attribute and experiments using Prisoner’s Dilemma games, to historical, ethnographic and survey research, with the last of these divided into studies of particular communities or a single society and cross-societal comparative surveys. The present study uses the last of these methods in order to answer the question: when the people of two or more societies have similar or different levels of trust, what are the causes and consequences of this? In earlier research, Hall (1999) sought explanations for the decline of trust in both Britain and the United States. Paxton (1999) suggested that generalized trust (of strangers) is low in societies where the rule of law is weak and corruption rampant. The causal mechanisms through which trust, generated by participation in voluntary organizations, is generalized to trust of strangers, in Sweden, Germany and the United States, were analyzed by Stolle (2001). Freitag (2003) compared the development of generalized trust in Japan and Switzerland. Economists interested in economic growth have also begun to empirically examine the role of trust. Zak and Knack (2001), for example, used data on generalized trust from 41 societies in the World Values Surveys to demonstrate that formal institutions (property rights and contract enforceability), the relative absence of corruption, lower levels of income and land inequality, and social homogeneity increase economic growth in part by building on the trust that exists among people. The present study is designed to test Francis Fukuyama’s claim that Japan has a higher level of generalized interpersonal trust than Taiwan, and to reconsider what he sees as the causes and consequences of this. What disturbed me when I recently read Fukuyama’s 1995 book, Trust: The Social Virtues and