The Effect Of Social Class On Trust In The Police

With the development of democratic politics,political trust has gradually attracted the attention of many scholars.As one of the main ways to measure political trust,trust in the police plays a vital role in social stability,the development of political civilization and the operation of modern civil society.Trust in the police is affected by many factors,and the influence of social class is becoming more and more important.China is in the period of social transformation,the gap between the rich and the poor is huge and the problem of social class differentiation is serious.And Japan,which has always been known for equality,the gap between the rich and the poor is small,but in recent years it is also facing the crisis of entering " class society".It is worth us to explore whether the class differentiation will affect people’s social attitudes,behavior,trust in the police and what is the effect of social class in different society.In this paper,social class is used as explanatory variable and we divide it into two aspects:objective class status and subjective social class to study the effect of them on trust in the police respectively.The statistical software of SPSS(23.0)is used to analyze the 2011-2012 Asian barometer survey data of Mainland China and Japan respectively.We recode the data in order to find out the factors that influence trust in the police and find out the similarities and differences of these factors.On this basis,we use descriptive analysis and binary logistic regression analysis to analyze the data.The study finds that in China the income,employment status and education(on behalf of the citizens’ objective class status)has no significant effect on trust in the police,and the subjective social class has a significant negative impact on trust in the police.While in Japan,subjective and objective factors have no significant impact on trust in the police.On the basis of empirical research,this paper further explains the above results combine with the results of previous studies.This paper shows that there is a certain correlation between social class and trust in thepolice.The different aspects of social class have different influence.And the influence of social class is different in different country and different environment.In the process of the improvement of trust in the police and political trust,we could reduce the negative impact of social class from many aspects such as the police,government,society and citizens.And improve the level of trust in the police and political trust comprehensively.