World political science regards world politics as an integrated whole, aiming to study the evolution of the nature and basic order of world politics. Its research approach is to examine the common factors and forces that shape the world political landscape and world order, as well as trigger their major changes. World political theories attempt to explain the main factors and mechanisms of order transformation from three dimensions: fundamental driving forces, direct driving forces, and operational mechanisms.
The fundamental driving forces of world politics include technological revolutions, struggles for recognition, capital and the world market, etc. These fundamental driving forces give rise to the direct driving forces of world politics—the ebb and flow of world political thoughts and the changes in the landscape of world political forces. The world political landscape shapes the world political order through such operational mechanisms as power coercion, learning and internalization, and political compromise. Eventually, through domestic and international political struggles, diverse concrete forms of basic international order and national institutions come into being.
To promote the research and academic exchanges of world political science, World Politics Research Center of Chenghai Institute of Global Development and Security has launched a series of publications titled World Politics Briefing. The Briefing is intended to present readers with academic masterpieces closely related to the research agenda of world political science, including monographs and papers published by scholars both at home and abroad in recent years. It is issued on a monthly basis, with each issue introducing the main contents of three academic achievements. The Briefing is for academic research purposes only, and the contents of the compiled works do not represent the views of this Center.
Three papers are selected in this issue for studies:
"World Social Sciences in an Era of Profound Transformation" by Zhao Kejin. According to the paper, the world today is undergoing great changes unseen in a century. A brand-new era inevitably calls for a new social science commensurate with it and requires opening up new horizons for world politics. The essence of these profound changes is not simply the decline of the United States and the rise of China, but the phasic end of the expansion of the capitalist world system that has lasted since the 15th century. Adopting Marxist historical materialism as the guiding framework, the author examines the formation of the modern international system within the longue durée of a millennium of civilizational history: From the 15th to the 18th century, capitalism divided the world into a "core-periphery" structure and established the Westphalian order based on sovereign states and led by Europe and America. After the 21st century, this order has been shaken by the institutional dilemmas of the West, the emergence of a global risk society, and the rise of emerging powers including China. Accordingly, the core question of international politics has shifted from "the struggle for power among states" to "how humanity as a whole can coexist".
The paper emphasizes that China now possesses the comprehensive national strength to shape its external environment. Its diplomatic strategy is no longer one of passively adapting to the international structure, but of proactively reshaping rules through the Belt and Road Initiative, the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, and the global governance concept of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits. In the future, China's diplomacy will focus on neighboring countries and the vast number of developing countries, promoting the reform of the global governance system through a multilateral network of partnerships. This indicates that the study of international politics must transcend traditional state-centrism and move toward a genuine world politics.
"International Technological Division of Labor, Technology Sharing, and Great-Power Technological Alliances: A Political Economy Analysis of Great Powers' Competition for Technological Followers" by Huang Qixuan and Li Wenjian. From the two dimensions of international technological division of labor and international technology sharing, this paper conducts a political economy analysis of the effectiveness of great powers in competing for technological followers. Adopting a comparative historical approach, it compares the effectiveness of great powers in securing technological followers across three cases: the Anglo‑American rivalry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the US‑Soviet competition during the Cold War, and the US‑Japan rivalry in the late 20th century.
The paper points out that when both the level of international technological division of labor and the level of international technology sharing are low, great powers achieve the worst results in competing for technological followers, as exemplified by Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Conversely, when both the level of international technological division of labor and the level of international technology sharing are high, great powers achieve the best results, as represented by the United States since the late 19th century. When only one of the two dimensions—international technology sharing or international technological division of labor—is high, great powers achieve moderate results, such as the Soviet Union during the Cold War (high international technology sharing, low international technological division of labor) and Japan in the late 20th century (high international technological division of labor, low international technology sharing). Since the late 19th century, the United States has secured more technological followers through technological division of labor and technology sharing in three rounds of great-power technological competition, establishing a U.S.-led technological alliance. The paper concludes that in great-power technological competition, higher levels of international technological division of labor and international technology sharing enable great powers to compete more effectively for technological followers.
"The Generational and Institutional Sources of the Global Decline in Voter Turnout" by Filip Kostelka and André Blais. Although the number of democracies has been steadily increasing, voter turnout has generally declined across countries. From an average of 77% in the 1960s, it dropped to approximately 67% after 2010. This trend has not only undermined the legitimacy of representative democracy but also exacerbated inequality in political participation, thus attracting considerable scholarly attention. Existing studies have offered various explanations, including the declining mobilization capacity of political parties, changes in partisan competition patterns, reforms of the voting age, rising income inequality, and economic globalization. However, most of these explanations are based on limited cases and lack cross-national systematic verification. Therefore, the core research questions of this paper are: What are the main causes of the global decline in voter turnout? What roles do generational factors and institutional factors play in this process?
This paper puts forward two core hypotheses. The first is the generational replacement hypothesis: as the "affluent generation," born into an environment of material prosperity and widespread education, gradually becomes the main body of voters, overall voter turnout will decline. This generation has a weaker identification with traditional civic obligations, tends to understand citizenship as rights rather than duties, and prefers to participate in politics through protests, online mobilization, or other non-electoral forms, thus displaying lower willingness to vote. The second is the institutional expansion hypothesis: as the number of elections and referendums in democratic countries continues to increase, citizens increasingly suffer from a "ballot fatigue" effect, which reduces their perception of the importance of a single election and further discourages voting. In comparison, other commonly cited explanatory factors—such as economic inequality and economic globalization—though frequently discussed in public discourse, are considered by the author to have limited explanatory power.
The empirical results show that both the generational replacement and institutional expansion hypotheses receive strong support. New generations of voters vote significantly less than older generations, a trend confirmed by both cross-national macro data and individual surveys. At the same time, an increase in the number of elections exhibits a significant negative correlation with declining voter turnout. In contrast, factors such as declining party mobilization, a lower voting age, rising income inequality, or economic globalization show no significant effect in large‑scale statistical models. Further counterfactual simulations indicate that absent generational replacement and institutional expansion, average contemporary voter turnout would be approximately 10 percentage points higher than observed levels. This suggests that the two factors together account for nearly all of the global decline in voter turnout.
Based on these findings, the author concludes that the root cause of the global decline in voter turnout lies in long-term changes in intergenerational socialization patterns and the increasing complexity of electoral systems. Material affluence has driven value shifts, leading younger generations to view voting less as a civic duty. Meanwhile, the growing number of electoral opportunities at the institutional level has created "voter fatigue," reducing the perceived importance of individual elections. This study carries significant theoretical and practical implications. Academically, it provides a multi-level integrated explanatory framework that combines micro-level value change with macro-level institutional design, addressing the limitations of previous single-factor explanations. From a policy perspective, it urges governments to confront low youth turnout seriously by adopting measures such as civic education, easier voting procedures, or election consolidation to alleviate voter fatigue and boost participation. At the normative level, the decline in turnout is unevenly distributed across social groups, being particularly pronounced among low-income and less-educated populations, which poses a challenge to democratic equality and policy representation.