Cross-border exchange programs have become an increasingly important instrument of external political influence, yet their effects on regime attitudes remain poorly understood. This study examines whether exchange programs to Mainland China affect Taiwanese students’ acceptance of the Communist Party of China regime. Using an integrated four-pathway framework encompassing affective, cognitive, instrumental, and ideological dimensions, this study analyzed a 10-year panel dataset of 600 Taiwanese students. Analysis revealed a modest but statistically significant short-term increase in regime acceptance at the end of the exchange programs, associated with improved affective evaluations, reduced cognitive threat perceptions, heightened instrumental interest in development opportunities, and a strengthened authoritarian order orientation. By situating these mechanisms within broader debates on authoritarian influence and democratic resilience, this study demonstrates how structured exchanges operate as agents of political socialization. This study offers an analytically transferable framework for examining non-coercive influence and political socialization in contested geopolitical contexts.
This article examines how citizens' understandings of democracy change during autocratization. It argues that democratic learning shifts through two linked pathways: lived experience of democratic institutions; and exposure to elite discourse. Turkey under the Justice and Development Party offers a most-likely case, combining prolonged autocratization, intensive democratic reframing and repeated survey data. The study first traces changes in learning conditions through narrowing opposition space, civil society erosion, media capture and shifts in regime discourse. It then analyses World Values Survey data from 2007, 2011 and 2018 using an age-period-cohort-informed design. Liberal-procedural understandings decline across waves, with a sharper early drop in the liberal dimension and a steeper late decline among government supporters. Social understandings follow a nonlinear pattern, rising first and then falling, especially on equality. The findings suggest that autocratization may coincide with shifts in citizens' democratic benchmarks.
This study explores the political cultural foundations of assertive foreign policy roles. By utilizing cultural dimensions widely used in comparative behavioral research, it shows how leaders' emphasis on different cultural frames influences their choice of assertive foreign policy roles differently. For this purpose, the study uses a novel, longitudinal dataset comprising 2000 speech texts delivered between 2000 and 2024 by leaders in Germany, Russia, T & uuml;rkiye, the UK, and the US. The findings provide evidence of a positive and significant influence of survival values, and a negative and significant influence of self-expressive values and rational-secular values on the use of assertive roles. The present study bridges comparative behavioral research and foreign policy analysis within a single analytical framework, and, by doing so, it contributes to the systematic, comparative study of culture in foreign policy analysis.
Since the 2010s, China’s public diplomacy rhetoric has undergone the shift from a traditionally restrained approach to a more assertive and confrontational style known as ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy. This paper discusses these developments within the broader context of digital diplomacy, where social media platforms like Twitter have become essential arenas for international discourse and influence. While previous research has largely defined social media success as visibility metrics such as likes and replies, this paper argues that visibility does not necessarily translate into endorsement. Combining LLM-based stance detection with network topology analysis, this paper reveals a structural paradox. While institutional accounts successfully use ‘wolf warrior’ rhetoric to close the visibility gap with individual diplomats, they struggle to convert attention into endorsement. Individual accounts, by contrast, demonstrate higher mobilization capacity, cultivating denser supporter networks. In the attention economy of global social media, being seen is not equivalent to being endorsed.
Conflict research is increasingly interested in grasping the exponential growth of armed Islamist groups in armed conflict over the past 50 years. Yet a crucial flaw of existing scholarship is that it misses the Shia factor – it overwhelmingly focuses on Sunni Islamists, with adverse empirical and theoretical implications. This article introduces the first comprehensive dataset of 228 major armed Sunni and Shia Islamist groups that have operated in armed conflict between 1945 and 2021 – DASSIG (Dataset of Armed Sunni and Shia Islamist Groups). The analysis shows the importance of including the Shia factor, by pointing to similarities and differences in the patterns, timings and locations of the evolution of armed Shia and Sunni Islamisms and by arguing that cross-sect interactions (positive and negative) between armed Islamist groups have significantly fuelled the growth of the phenomenon over time. More broadly, these findings call for further disaggregation in studies of the role of ideology/religion and how it intersects with other factors in conflicts.
