A Review of Taiwanese Trust in the Police with Alternative Interpretations

This study aims to review and reinterpret Taiwanese citizens' trust in the police, with a focus on taking its social changes, political transitions, and historical background into consideration. Modern Taiwan inherits both Chinese and Japanese cultures, and the urbanization on the island has generated substantial differences between rural areas and metropolitans. The political system has also successfully transformed from authoritarianism to democracy since late 1980s and subsequently leads to paradigm shift in policing. All of the contemporary empirical studies regarding public assessments of the police are based on survey data, however, they either poorly measure the multi-dimensional nature of trust as a social construct or understudy social-historical context when interpreting survey findings. This review attempts to fill the gap and points out the demand of qualitative insights in future research.