Between Autocratic Linkage, Support and Non-interference: An Assessment of China’s Influence in South-Eastern, Central, and Eastern Europe

The enthusiasm driven by the third wave of global democratization during the 1970s recently rolled back at the onset of a new wave of autocratization and the simultaneous rise of authoritarian powers such as Russia and China. Whether the empirical phenomenon of recent autocratization is connected with the increasing Chinese engagement with other countries remains unclear. This article addresses this gap by investigating the impact of the Chinese external influence on the evolution of regimes located in South-Eastern, Central and Eastern Europe. By employing data from different sources such as V-Dem dataset, WITS and CEPII database and by running random- and fixed-effects regression analyses, this study presents a comprehensive picture of the Chinese engagement’s role on other countries’ autocratization tendencies and their shifts in democratic quality.