National Dependence and Public Perceptions: Understanding the Economic Determinants of Foreign Policy Preferences Toward China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relationship between economic dependence and foreign influence has become an increasingly prominent topic in International Relations. However, academic studies and public discussion largely overlook that dependence could influence not only states’ official policies but also the foreign policy preferences of their populations. In addition, they simplistically assume that material dependence directly establishes influence without considering additional complexities brought on by actors’ perceptions of such realities. This could lead to misunderstandings regarding the mechanisms through which economic dependence leads to foreign influence. The problem is especially glaring in relation to China, whose economic clout has been argued to represent a key vector of its global influence. This article studies how economic dependence shapes the foreign policy preferences of populations around the world and, thereby, constitutes a vector of China’s international influence. We use novel public opinion data from more than 79,000 respondents in 54 countries to clarify the relative weight of material economic realities and public perceptions of them in shaping foreign policy preferences toward China. In doing so, we also establish the relative extent to which individuals base their preferences on an egoistic or sociotropic sense of economic self-interest. Our results illustrate that perceptions outweigh economic realities in shaping preferences on China. Furthermore, economic dependence has no uniform effects on national populations, suggesting that its effects are primarily expressed through egotropic ways. Our results suggest that the disconnect between perceptions of China’s economic importance and material realities needs to be closely considered when studying China’s international influence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".