Abstract
The NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute is a member of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), which carried out the “2016 Role of Government” survey. This paper compares survey results from 35 countries/regions and reports the positioning of the Japanese expectations on the government roles in comparison with other places of the world. The survey asks respondents about government’s responsibility in various areas. 53% of the Japanese said it is the “government’s responsibility” to “provide a decent standard of living for the unemployed,” and 67% said so for “give financial help to university students from low-income families.” Both figures are relatively low among surveyed countries. Meanwhile, those who said so for “keep price under control” account for nearly 90%, which is in the top one third of the surveyed nations. Compared to other nations, the Japanese tend to place higher expectations for the government on economic matters than in other fields. Regarding the attitudes towards government spending, 46% of the Japanese said that the government should spend more on “old age pensions,” which is lower than in other countries. People who would like to see more government spending on “the military and defense” increased in many countries including Japan. With the world experiencing frequent terror attacks that shake social security, tolerance for tapping of telephone conversations by the police was surveyed on the supposition that the government suspected that a terrorist act was about to happen. In Japan those who think the authorities should “have the right to do so” increased from 47% in 2006 to 59% while in France, which had suffered a series of terror attacks by Islamic extremists, the figure rose from 77% to 91%.
