Willingness to Complain About National Government and Noisy Neighbors in Four Countries

We administered a national government political ideology scale, a personal political ideology scale, a scale to measure the right to complain about noisy neighbors, and the right to complain about one’s national government, to samples of university students recruited in India, the Philippines, United States, and Vietnam. We hypothesized that across all four countries attitude scores on willingness to complain would be higher on complaints about noisy neighbors than complaints about one’s national government. Our results showed this to be false for all but the Vietnamese sample. We also hypothesized that willingness to complain scores about one’s government would be highest in the United States relative to the other three countries. We found that the United States was second highest, perhaps because data were collected in a conservative area of the country. We hypothesized that across all four countries there would be a positive correlation between discrepancy scores and willingness to complain about one’s national government. This hypothesis was disconfirmed, possibly because discrepancy scores were quite low and not widely dispersed. Our analysis of gender differences in willingness to complain about either noisy neighbors or one’s national government revealed no significant differences across all four countries. Discussion focused on understanding the results.