The Program for East Asia Democratic Studies is a program under the auspice of the University “Academic Excellence” Development Projects funded by the Ministry of Education. As a program aims to promote research capacity and to reach academic excellence, the Asian Barometer Survey (formerly the East Asia Barometer Survey, founded in year 2000) is the pillar of the whole program in which over 2 billion Asians have been surveyed since December 2003. Then the East Asia Barometer cooperated with the South Asia Barometer Survey and merged the two networks to become the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS). In year 2006, the ABS began its second wave survey across the East Asia region. Besides providing financial and technical support to the country surveys (12 countries in East and Southeast Asia), the ABS is also responsible for holding various academic seminars and symposiums to display survey results to the general public. The theme of the 2006 survey is “Democracy, Governance and Development” for which the ABS will conduct surveys regularly to investigate the citizens' attitudes and value changes regarding democracy, governance and development. The ABS has gained a high reputation in the academic world over the years, and in 2003 the ABS became a member of the Network of Democracy Research Institute. Moreover, the International Social Science Council of UNESCO lists the ABS as one of the large-scale survey programs in the world, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has included the ABS in its publication of “Governance Indicator: A Users' Guide.”