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Images of Government, Business, and Citizen Identity in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2010

GILL STEEL
GILL STEEL*
Affiliation:
Department of Social Psychology, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, 113-0033, [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper presents a country profile of the United States using data from the AsiaBarometer (2008) survey. I first examine how citizens see themselves, their government and big business. My findings show that Americans remain ambivalent toward politics, their government, and big business. Citizens overwhelmingly support democracy as a political system and are satisfied with a broad range of specific democratic rights, but, at the same time, they complain about the workings of their democratic system, policy output, and many distrust government and big business. I then examine the role citizens play in politics, analyzing who participates and why.

Type
Research Article
Information
Japanese Journal of Political Science , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 2010 , pp. 99 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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