A study of general public's trust in government and corporation in the issues of defense and nuclear power policies

Abstract

This study examined general public's trust in national government and electric power companies in terms of nuclear power policies, and that in the government in terms of defense policies. A questionnaire was distributed to a sample of 560 Kobe citizens, and a total of 409 complete it. Covariance structure analysis was performed to test hypotheses of the present study. Results suggested that the more demanding of the government and corporations, the lower the person's trust. How well the person understood the difficulty of the work involved hardly affected his/her demand and trust in all three actors of the two issues. Results also indicated that the person who perceived the government to be under pressure to appear trustworthy tended to have lower trust in them, that Yamagishi's general trust (1998) did not influence the trust in the cases, and that awareness of popular political empowerment had a negative impact on the trust in the government.