The Asian Barometer (ABS) is an applied research program on public opinion on political values, democracy, and governance around the region.
The regional network encompasses research teams from 13 East Asian political systems (Japan, Mongolia, South Koreas, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia), and 5 South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal).
Together, this regional survey network covers virtually all major political systems in the region, systems that have experienced different trajectories of regime evolution and are currently at different stages of political transition.
The mission and task of each national research team are to administer survey instruments to compile the required micro-level data under a common research framework and research methodology to ensure that the data is reliable and comparable on the issues of citizens' attitudes and values toward politics, power, reform, and democracy in Asia.
The Asian Barometer Survey is headquartered in Taipei and co-hosted by the Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica and The Institute for the Advanced Studies of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Taiwan University.
The Program for East Asia Democratic Studies is a program under the auspice of the University “Academic Excellence” Development Projects funded by the Ministry of Education. As a program aims to promote research capacity and to reach academic excellence, the Asian Barometer Survey (formerly the East Asia Barometer Survey, founded in year 2000) is the pillar of the whole program in which over 2 billion Asians have been surveyed since December 2003. Then the East Asia Barometer cooperated with the South Asia Barometer Survey and merged the two networks to become the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS). In year 2006, the ABS began its second wave survey across the East Asia region.
Besides providing financial and technical support to the country surveys (12 countries in East and Southeast Asia), the ABS is also responsible for holding various academic seminars and symposiums to display survey results to the general public.
The theme of the 2006 survey is “Democracy, Governance and Development” for which the ABS will conduct surveys regularly to investigate the citizens' attitudes and value changes regarding democracy, governance and development.
The ABS has gained a high reputation in the academic world over the years, and in 2003 the ABS became a member of the Network of Democracy Research Institute. Moreover, the International Social Science Council of UNESCO lists the ABS as one of the large-scale survey programs in the world, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has included the ABS in its publication of “Governance Indicator: A Users' Guide.”
