arbiter
JournalsPricingAccount

Authoritarian economic soft power: the case of Russian and Chinese investments in Central Europe

Karel Svoboda

Post-Communist Economies2025https://doi.org/10.1080/14631377.2025.2463039article
AJG 1ABDC B
Weight
0.41

What the paper says

The paper deals with the economic soft power strategies of authoritarian countries in the Visegrad region: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Based on the material of authoritarian countries, state-owned enterprises and investments, economic soft power is necessary for the investment to be accepted and not perceived as a security issue. Based on empirical material, it concludes that even if the countries’ overall soft power ranking is low, they can overcome such an obstacle through cooperation with populist leaders. Even scaling down their presence for economic and non-economic reasons, Russia and China still leave the room for a return open, as the investment relies on a populist type of ruler, not a specific politician. It uses two case studies, one for Sputnik V as the economic soft power creation strategy and the case of CITIC departure for the scaling down presence strategy.

2 citations

Open paper page →

Cite this paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14631377.2025.2463039

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{karel2025,
  title        = {{Authoritarian economic soft power: the case of Russian and Chinese investments in Central Europe}},
  author       = {Karel Svoboda},
  journal      = {Post-Communist Economies},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14631377.2025.2463039},
}

Paste directly into BibTeX, Zotero, or your reference manager.

Flag this paper

Authoritarian economic soft power: the case of Russian and Chinese investments in Central Europe

Flags are reviewed by the Arbiter methodology team within 5 business days.

Evidence weight

0.41

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.25 × 0.4 = 0.10
M · momentum0.55 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 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.