7 - Political Regimes and BRI Project Characteristics

Summary

The puzzle of this chapter is whether characteristics of BRI projects display patterns corresponding to a host country’s political regime. The prevailing counterargument is that BRI projects reflect primarily what China wants. The evidence presented in this chapter is based on a different dataset from the prior chapter and includes over 2,100 projects up through 2019 across 127 countries. For each project, ten characteristics were manually coded. The findings both corroborate the importance of electoral autocracies and also provide more detailed evidence for systematic differences in the structure of BRI projects depending on the political regime in which they are located. The analysis demonstrates clear and significant patterns between BRI project characteristics and political regimes as well as for strong versus weak electoral autocrats that are consistent with and extend the findings of the previous chapter.