Toward a Political Model of Soft Power
Jenna Gibson & Felicia Istad
What the paper says
Soft power, the idea that states can achieve their goals through attraction rather than coercion, has been applied to various contexts, leading to significant concept creep. Still, it remains appealing as a way to describe state behavior beyond military and economic factors. This article proposes a model that returns to the core of soft power, which involves both a positive affective response (“sentiment”) and an explicit political goal (“politicality”). This model clarifies the concept of soft power and offers a practical framework for both policymakers and scholars. We test our model by analyzing the reception of a South Korean government initiative: the 2021 visit to the UN General Assembly by former president Moon Jae-in and BTS. Sentiment analysis and topic modeling of 116,758 YouTube comments reveal strong positive sentiment but limited engagement with the political message. These findings challenge assumptions about soft power and have implications for foreign policy.
1 citation
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06 |
| M · momentum | 0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.