Emerging methodologies in socio-political risk research: An introduction

Abstract

This editorial introduces a special issue (SI) aimed at advancing research on socio-political risk (SPR) and its impact on international business (IB) through methodological innovations. To contextualize the contributions of this SI and shed light on how SPR research has evolved over time, we first examine recent methodological trends in the field. We conducted bibliometric analysis of 829 SPR-related papers published in top management journals between 2019 and 2023 to identify recent changes in the use of methodologies in SPR scholarship. This analysis demonstrates that SPR research had some methodological diversity, relying predominantly on regression analysis, followed by case studies, textual analysis, and discrete choice modeling. Certain methods were used more frequently than others for studying specific types of SPRs. Our findings also revealed dissatisfaction with aggregate measures of SPRs, leading to increased use of content analysis for improving the understanding of SPR's multidimensionality. To address some of these gaps and to take SPR scholarship to the next methodological level, we selected seven pioneering papers for this SI. Two SI papers explain the use of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) for studying the multifaceted nature and subjectivity of SPR. The SI introduces two novel datasets: one on lobbying for the analyzing corporate political activities of foreign firms in the US and another on nightlights data for SPR analysis. Three innovative measures offered in the SI's papers are especially useful for measuring specific SPR aspects such as nationalistic political rhetoric, grassroots socio-political sentiments, and cross-national information distance. These contributions aim to extend our understanding of SPRs within international management domain by emphasizing the need for methodological pluralism and interdisciplinary approaches when studying SPR.