Research

In recent years, scholars and policymakers have expressed growing concern about powerful non-democracies becoming more assertive in their foreign policy. According to popular accounts, this has included increased attempts by Russia and China to influence political outcomes in less powerful nations. In this paper, we introduce a new, high-frequency dataset tracking reporting on influence by Russia and China, describe monthly trends in RAI since 2012, including the specific tools used to influence target countries, and assess empirically whether this resurgence is real, providing evidence that authoritiarian influence has increased dramatically in recent years. In doing so, we provide one of the first tests of an empirical claim driving high-level decision-making in foreign policy and international advocacy.

Policy Brief

Policy Report

This research memo reports assess the relationship between Resurgent Authoritarianism Influence (RAI) and changes in civic space. We present evidence that for some countries, increases in RAI activity are associated with near-term changes in civic space. In doing so, we provide one of the first tests of a claim driving high-level decision-making in foreign policy and international advocacy. We find that increases in RAI are more often associated with increasing restrictions on civic space, although increases in RAI are also predictive of decreasing restrictions in some cases. Conversely, civic space events are not predictive of RAI events. Together, these findings provide evidence that influence from Russia and China are not so much responding to civic space dynamics in target countries as they are trying to shape it.

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This research memo reviews the academic and policy literatures on Resurgent Authoritarian Influence (RAI), discusses existing data, and describes the MLP RAI data. We group our 22 RAI events into 5 conceptual categories and summarize the prevalence of reporting on these categories across countries and over time using visualizations, descriptive statistics, and dimensionality reduction. This analysis suggest that RAI activity has been surprisingly consistent over the last ten years, that Russia and China utilize regionally-specific approaches to exerting influence, and that Russia and China deployed similar strategies when dealing with strategically important countries with which they have a strained or hostile relationship.

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