This article deals with some new theoretical and methodological challenges for contemporary political science to wait for consideration. These challenges are ontological and epistemological; on the one hand, they derive from the objective dynamics the political, economic and social reality and, on the other hand, from the emerging dilemmas of political science itself. The first type of challenges comprises the following ones: the collapse of the post-Cold war world order, the absence of the new theory of political development, the new conservative wave and its consequences. The question of key drivers of political development – socio-economic vs. cultural and value-based – is among academic issues to be addressed. The significant variability of both authoritarianism and democracy is also a essential challenge. In relation to democracies, there is now almost a crosscutting topic of more or less gradual and smooth erosion of democracies “from within” (in contrast to undermining of democracies “from the outside” in the 20th century). The issues of capacity and resilience of modern states are also actively discussed by researchers; there is a possibility that these discussions will help to overcome the long-established focus on regime characteristics in the assessment of modern states. Among epistemological challenges, it is worth mentioning the balance of quantitative and qualitative methods, the problem of multidisciplinary approach, etc. This article concentrates on the first type of challenges.

Empirical research in Comparative Politics and International Relations is often built not only on statistical data, but also on expert evaluation data. However, the methods of data analysis employed in this case often fail to account for the differences between statistical and expert evaluation data, and disregard the extra uncertainty in the latter. This article focuses the state-of-the-art methods for collecting and processing expert evaluation data in political science research, as well as open questions in this area. The article presents Bayesian data analysis as the most natural approach to analyzing subjective data and focuses on the differences between Bayesian and classical approaches. Then the article focuses on the methods for obtaining expert evaluations through prior elicitation for further use in Bayesian analysis. These approaches are illustrated using examples from the research project “Political Atlas of the Modern World 2.0”. The next section discusses the possibility of replacing expert evaluation data with crowdcoding, i.e. the procedures for annotating or coding qualitative features by non-experts based on formalized instructions. The article cites both successful examples of crowdcoding usage in empirical research and potential challenges for its integration into research in Comparative Politics and International Relations. Finally, the author addresses the issues of integrating expert evaluation data, on the one hand, and artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, on the other. We highlight their compatibility in the framework of Bayesian data analysis.

Attention to the problem of “order” in political science is not a surprise. Neither are the realities designated by the categories of “political order” or the “international order”. The growth of this attention may mean that what is happening in some sphere of life differs from the usual, from previously observed dynamics. As an integral part of the language of politics as well as a category of social sciences, including the political science, “order” in general, “political order”, and “international order” in particular, usually carry strong normative and ideological connotations and reflect certain expectations and perceptions. This article proposes a classification of approaches to the category of international orders, including those with minimal normative and ideological connotations and thus potentially possessing greater analytical value (the positional approach is one of them).
The sign of the existence of an international order (world order) in real life is the predictability and repeatability of the actions of those who are subject to the order (regardless of the diversity of ideas about its parameters and origins). The establishment of an international order, which is usually qualified as liberal, is associated with the rapid rise (growth of power) of the USA in the 19^th – early 20^th centuries. In the thirty years following the end of the Cold War, there was a roughly similar rapid rise of China, which gradually returns the world to a situation of competitive orders maintained by superpowers with global ambitions and global reach.

The article examines the interaction of multipolarity and multilateralism as two independent variables influencing the formation of the new world order. The author describes assets and liabilities of multilateral mechanisms for solving international security and development problems, the differences between the likely future models of multilateral cooperation and the models of the XX century, the impact of globalization and deglobalization on the development of multilateralism in international relations. The differences between a narrow (conservative) and a broad (radical) understanding of multilateralism are revealed, special attention is paid to the role of values as the basis of stable and effective multilateral mechanisms. The author criticizes the notion that such mechanisms are possible only if their participants are liberal democracies, concluding that multilateral practices should reflect convergence of interests rather than community of values. The article enumerates the conditions for the effectiveness of multilateral agreements, including the principle of “diffuse reciprocity”, that is, the readiness of the parties to such agreements to sacrifice part of their immediate specific interests for the sake of supposed, although not yet clearly defined, reciprocal steps on the part of partners. The author argues that future multilateral institutions, regimes and agreements are likely to function in a system that does not have a single and universally recognized hegemon and in conditions of relative weakness of international organizations and international law. The author concludes that in the near future, the most productive and least costly formats of “project multilateralism” will imply putting together flexible situational coalitions of states and non-state participants in international relations to solve specific problems of global and regional governance. The accumulation of positive practices of “project multilateralism” will make it possible to move gradually to more advanced practices of “strategic multilateralism”.

The article analyzes the reasons why, on the one hand, special attention is currently being paid to the analysis of the modern world order, on the other – the world order has remained uncertain for 30 years. It is shown, that the world order (understood in most studies as the relationship between the leading states of the world) is only part of the political organization of the world. The political organization of the world is at least a three-level system, which, along with the system of interstate relations, includes as a basis the principles of the Westphalian model of the world, where the main principle is sovereignty, as well as the political systems of various states of the world. Due to the fact, that the basis of the political organization of the world (the Westphalian model) is being eroded, the question of the system of interstate relations becomes largely irrelevant. The interests of various actors in world politics become important for understanding how the political organization of the world will be formed. The article analyzes the interests of states, international organizations, business structures, subnational territories, as well as universities, the media and international NGOs. The article shows that, in modern conditions, the economic and humanitarian interests of various actors are converted into political interests. This gives a reason to believe that the political organization of the world of the future (the political architecture of the world) will not be able to ignore the interests of various actors in world politics. The author states that there will be further transnationalization of actors associated not only with globalization defined as the transparency of national borders, but also with the interaction, and sometimes “sprouting” of the structures of some actors into the structures of other actors. One of the most important parameters of building a new architecture of world politics will be network relations. At the same time, digital technologies will be actively introduced into international political practice, which will affect the political organization of the world, just as the industrial revolution once influenced the development of capitalism.

The article examines the processes of transformation of the World System, which are expressed in large, fundamental changes. The World System is in a phase preceding its transition into a new qualitative state, with a change in the balance of power in a variety of aspects and parameters. The growing power of globalism and the globalist world order has been discussed. As a part of the analysis carried out in the article, it is noted that the ongoing changes in (of) the World System occur rarely, once every few decades, and periods of profound changes can last for a long time. The authors suggest that the period of reconfiguration of the World System and the formation of a new world order will take at least one and a half to two decades, and possibly more. At the same time, the authors argue it is very likely that this will be a very turbulent period, with a further aggravation of contradictions and their possible transition to armed conflicts. The authors claim that such fundamental transformations occur as a result of not only changes in international relations and reconfigurations in the balance of power in the military-technological potentials of countries and the geopolitical alignment in general (which is necessary), but also of the accumulation of major qualitative changes in almost all areas: from demographic to cultural; from technological to ideological. The article analyzes and demonstrates the dynamics of such changes over the past decades.  

The article discusses strengths and weaknesses of using gross domestic product (GDP) data as a measure of economic power in international relations. It is argued that country comparisons based on GDP figures calculated with current exchange rates provide biased results that can be unduly used to substantiate the idea of the new bipolar (USA vs. China) world order. In contrast, GDP calculations based on purchasing power parity (PPP) provide much more realistic and balanced picture. Three groups of countries and regional blocks are identified on the basis of their economic potential that can be used to grant them leading positions in the emerging global order. The first group consists of ‘economic supergiants’ (China, US, EU); India and ASEAN with rapidly growing economies follow as members of the second group, while the third group is comprised of economies with less than 4 per cent (and mostly declining or stagnant) individual shares in global GDP. Key issues of global economic and political rivalry where coalition formation among the global national and subnational players are listed. Economic power of the Russian Federation is discussed in comparative perspective as well as opportunities to join national economic potential with partner countries to expand control over the global agenda.

The development and spread of the Internet in recent decades have become one of the most important global processes covering all regions of the world. Like all processes of this scale, it creates a complex system of opportunities and risks at all levels. In this work, the authors focus on such a dimension as the risks to the internal stability of states generated by mass protest movements. States with different political regimes associate the spread of the Internet with a threat to the stability of the internal political order, as evidenced by the global trend of increasing efforts to organize politically motivated censorship of the Internet content. Which of these processes – growing coordination and information capabilities of protest movements or increasing state influence on the global network – has a greater impact on protest activity? And what direction does this impact have? In order to answer these questions, the authors undertook a quantitative study of a panel data on 160 countries in 1990–2019. The key independent variables were the levels of Internet penetration (World Bank data) and state Internet censorship (V-Dem), the dependent variable was the maximum number of protesters per year (Mass Mobilization Project). The results of ordinal logistic regression demonstrate that there was not the Internet penetration per se, but the state’s response to the development of Internet technologies plays the most important role in the relationship between information and communication technologies and the scale of street protest activity. This relationship is nonlinear, it has a quadratic n-shape. The maximum number of protesters is achieved, although at a high, but still not at the maximum level of Internet freedom from censorship. At the same time, total censorship is indeed robustly associated with the absence of street protest mobilization. The identified pattern can be traced both within the full dataset and within each of the three main chronological eras of the development of the Internet: 1995–2005, 2006–2015, and 2016–2019.

Modern researchers of militarized interstate disputes pay significant attention to the effects of structural characteristics, such as raw military and economic power, political system and geographical position. At the same time, the role of key decision-makers in outbreak of militarized interstate disputes receives scant scholar attention. This paper relates two pivotal characteristics of leaders, type of entry into the office and tenure, with the likelihood of militarized interstate disputes. Our theory focuses on two key problems: incomplete information and credible commitment. The authors theorize that leaders with asymmetric tenures and regular type of entries are less likely to engage in war with each other while leaders with symmetric tenures and irregular type of entries are more likely to start a military conflict with each other. Statistical findings from dyadic logit regression analysis and robustness checks largely confirm theoretical expectations.

The article substantiates the need to develop a universal index of institutionalized competition and participation to be applied for assessing political regimes in different states. This need is dictated by changes in societies and channels of social communication produced by modernization and political development. In political science, it is customary to consider such processes in the context of democratization, but, in this case, a value-neutral assessment is offered. It is based only on “hard” statistical data (primarily electoral) and analysis of the constitutional design of political systems. Since a national parliament and the universal active suffrage can be found in the vast majority of countries around the world, such an assessment might be close to universal.
It is proposed to include one variable in the index to assess political participation – data on turnout in national elections as a share of a country’s total adult population. Political competition is analyzed basing on three primary and four additional variables. The primary variables are the levels of competition in the formation of the executive branch and the parliament, respectively, as well as the role of the legislative branch in the formation of the executive one. Additional variables include duration of the minimal electoral tradition, availability (or absence) of cases of two or more changes of power as a result of elections in country’s history, availability (or absence) of cases of deviation from constitutional norms during formation or removal from power (for example, coups d’état), availability (or absence) of cases of one person holding power for a period of three or more electoral cycles.
Such an index is comprehensive and universal; its development might make it possible to assess and compare institutional conditions of political participation and competition in the vast majority of countries in the world.

The article takes a critical view of the data-driven approaches to public management and the common pitfalls in decision-making stemming from unreliable data and misinterpretations. Historical examples of misconceptions made by US Secretary of Defense R. McNamara are given, and the disastrous policy of discarding qualitative assessments in favor of using only measurable parameters are examined. By the example of incorrect interpretation of demographic statistics in Kosovo, the influence of deliberately false and uncritically perceived information in decision-making regarding the national policy in the former Yugoslavia and further humanitarian intervention under the auspices of protecting the Albanian population from genocide are examined. The reasons for these misconceptions are studied and examples of correct interpretations are provided. The author also focuses on the means to avoid traps set by available statistics. Basing on the author’s experience in preliminary analysis and processing of data used in academic projects, methods are proposed to circumvent the typical “traps” of statistics that lead to incorrect interpretations and findings.

The potential of a state in developing its “soft power” is an important component in assessing its state capacity. A nation’s “soft power” not only refers to its external attractiveness and informal influence on decisions made by other international actors, but also serves as an important indicator of a country's potential to affect the formation of a more favorable external environment. The validity of “soft power” indices has not so far been thoroughly studied. This gap poses a significant limitation to practical applications of these indices in comparative empirical research. We fill this gap by conducting the validity analysis and showing that existing “soft power” indices present a number of challenges, including an unknown or unjustified choice of data aggregation method, inconsistency in the conceptualization of proxy variables, and the inclusion of survey results of public opinion and expert surveys in the analysis. This study introduces and tests some ways to overcome the identified problems. These include measuring only the resources of “soft power”, relying on a rigorous conceptual framework, refraining from using subjective data, and employing the principal component method for a more methodologically sound selection of the final weights. This work provides an example of how a more valid index could be developed, though the choice of both proxy variables and possible measurements of “soft power” still requires further empirical research.

“Political Atlas of the Modern World 2.0” research project as well as its predecessor provides a wide range of opportunities to reveal the structures of the modern world composed of nation-states. At the same time, the project is missing a number of phenomena of contemporary international politics. One of them is the use of the instruments of economic coercion. Above all, such instruments imply economic sanctions, i.e. unilateral restrictive measures of nation-states vis a vis each other or particular persons in finance, trade, transportation and other economic domains to achieve political goals. The question is how to deal with sanctions under the framework of “Political Atlas of the Modern World 2.0”? The key point is that sanctions might be operationalized both in terms of internal threats for a nation-state as well as the component of its foreign policy toolbox. The article highlights understanding of a concept of sanctions, reveal major methodological problems related to empirical and theoretical research of sanctions and provides options to operationalize sanctions in a set of variables. The study of sanctions policy may become a subproject within the framework of the “Political Atlas of the Modern World 2.0” to expand the main database and also to develop of individual specialized topics within the overall framework of the project.

The article focuses on the conceptual and methodological difficulties of empirical assessment of the states’ military capabilities. Contemporary IR theory and political science mostly interpret military power as a dispositional or episodic characteristic. The first approach comprises the estimation of resources and material capabilities available to a state to violently coerce (or resist coercion) in international politics. The second approach suggests that military power only actualizes itself through direct usage in armed conflicts. The article provides a detailed examination of the conceptual and empirical advantages and limitations of both approaches. As the literature review demonstrates, while realist IR literature piques a lot of attention to the distribution of military power in the international system, it struggles to resolve methodological difficulties of empirical assessment and, therefore, actual ranking of military capabilities of states. The second part of the article explores empirical attempts to measure military power in IR. The author concludes that existing solutions are limited to proxy indicators such as defense expenditures and military personnel numbers. The final part of the article suggests promising indicators of military power as a dispositional or episodic phenomenon.

The effectiveness of government policies to ensure cyber- and information security directly depends on how successfully such measures are followed by citizens at the national level. The author considers the influence of cognitive-rational, value-affective, and socio-demographic factors on respondents' support for government policy in the field of information regulation through selected cases of regulating social networks and introducing a mandatory face recognition system in public transport. In the course of the study, a factorial survey (N=395) was conducted using vignettes to examine the effects of framing on respondents' perception of the measures proposed. The analysis of the experimental results in this study shows that news framing to persuade the population to support the proposed measures does not lead in the short term to an increase in support for the measures. However, certain factors influencing public perception, such as civic identity, trust in the political system, and assessment of cyber threats danger, show less variability over time. The results of the study allow us to confirm the hypothesis of a direct connection between civic identity and support for restrictive measures, as well as partially confirm the assumption that the political trust of citizens and the specifics of perception of cyber threats positively influence support for the introduction of measures. In addition, the heterogeneity of support for government measures at various levels of political trust of respondents was revealed, therefore we can identify the further potential of research on public perception of such measures taking into account trust in the political system and individual political actors (government, special services, army, etc.) in Russia.