[Blog Assigment 1] WVS analysis — Important in life: Politics-Liuxinlei

 Because of the different political systems, I am often interested in other countries' views on politics. So I collected some countries with typical politics and analyzed their importance to politics in life from 2017 to 2020.

From the chart, we can see that the country that thinks politics is very important is Iraq. We know that before 2003, it was always under a one-party dictatorship, but after 2003 the regime was overthrown and Iraq began the work of regime reconstruction. Until 2005, Iraq was occupied by the United States, and the Iraqi Transitional Government was formally sworn in. Compared with other countries, the political turmoil in Iraq has been an international topic until now. I believe that as the people of Iraq, the turbulent political situation will affect daily life.

At the same time, I am concerned about the data differences between Hong Kong and China. Because the Chinese government has proposed the "one country, two systems" political policy, the political relationship between Hong Kong and China has always been a hot topic in the world. Coupled with this year's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government's implementation of new national security laws, the political relationship between China and Hong Kong has once again attracted public attention. As a mainland Chinese, I am surprised that Hong Kong people are less concerned about politics than China. When I was in China, Chinese official media were happy to report that Hong Kong people were concerned about politics and supported the Chinese government's series of policies for Hong Kong. But the chart shows the opposite.

We can see that among the options that are considered politically important, South Korea's data exceeds half. Japan is closely behind, and it is hard not to speculate that the degree of interest in politics by Asian countries comes from the sense of participation in the concept of state in East Asian culture. There is an old Chinese saying that "天下兴亡，匹夫有责。" It means that every people is responsible for the development of this country. We can see from a horizontal comparison that Hong Kong considers politics the most important. What I learned from media with a more neutral political stance is that a large number of people in Hong Kong do not care about political changes (in a sense, they do not care about which government Hong Kong is managed by), but they care more about themselves. Has daily life been affected?

I have learned about the theory of "symbolic politics". It mentioned the United States in its example. It said that the United States is a highly free country. All people can participate in politics by voting and elect their own president. (Many Countries can do it, but not in China: () But in fact, the political participation rate of the American people is very low, because the mass media has no way to remain neutral. Trump declared in the 2016 US election that he did not spend a lot of energy on public opinion The investigation may also be due to this reason. Through these examples, I am not so surprised that the American people have a high proportion of political importance in the results of the investigation.