World Values Survey 2017 : Generating Data for Trust Maintenance, Repair, and Better Governance in Post-Occupy Hong Kong

Trust is a prerequisite of social integration, economic efficiency, and the stability and sustainability of a political system. The prevalence of contention in Hong Kong in recent years is an indicator of a lack of trust between state and society, and even among members of the two sectors. The aim of the project is to address the grave issue of trust in Hong Kong by generating a solid and internationally-comparable set of data on social values, upon which trust repair and maintenance strategies can be developed. We have implemented the seventh Wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), the world’s largest cross-national and time-series investigation of human beliefs and values and one of the most reputable measurement of social and political trust in the world, and supplemented it with localized questions, experimental design and qualitative interviews. The primary finding is that citizen’s social and political trusts are dynamic in nature, changing over time and varying among different sectors. Both quantitative and qualitative data also suggested there is a general trend of declining social and political trusts in the city, which are often influenced by protest experience and age, and further moderated by values, identity, gender, access to social media and perceived outcomes. Other socio-demographic indicators are not significant.

These findings revealed a challenge to governance: how to manage diverse values and rising expectations on public serves from citizens as well as absorb and respond to the decline in social and political trusts. A list of tentative policy recommendations regarding public opinion tracing, strategic partnerships with trusted organizations, civic education programs, and community and digital engagements are derived. The trend and determinants of trusts are increasingly correlated to indicators and platforms commonly associated with political polarization and identity politics. The government is therefore recommended to increase the citizens’ political efficacy in policymaking and everyday life in order to check the intensification of both apathetic and populistic sentiments among the population.