Examining People’s Attitudes and Values Relating to International Relations in the Asia-Pacific Region

The purpose of this paper is to grasp stable and reliable understanding about the attitudes of people in Asia-Pacific relating to international relations by analyzing the results of a longitudinal and cross-national comparative survey: Asia-Pacific Values Survey (APVS: 2010–13), Pacific Rim Values Survey (PRVS: 2004–2009), and East Asia Values Survey (EAVS: 2002–2005). In the analyses, this paper focuses on the three sets of question items: attitudes toward foreign countries, law/contract consciousness, and confidence in the United Nations. Regarding people’s attitudes toward foreign countries, changes in the political and social conditions such as the rise of China and the Great East Japan Earthquake (March 11, 2011) are expected to have influenced people’s attitudes toward Japan and China between PRVS and APVS by previous studies. However, our analysis shows that this is not the case. Moreover, multidimensional analyses of both law/contract consciousness and confidence in the United Nations show that there are four clusters of countries/areas in the Asia-Pacific region. These patterns of clustering are reliable as well as interesting results, which previous studies have had difficulty explaining.