About Us & Acknowledgements
The Anatomy of Choice Alignment Index (AOCAI) is one component of a larger project entitled ‘Anatomy of Choice: Southeast Asia Between the Superpowers’, with the latter being supported by a Singapore Social Science Research Council Grant (MOE-SSRTG). The project’s Principal Investigator (PI) is Professor Yuen Foong Khong of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore’s (NUS-LKYSPP), and the Co-PI is Joseph Chinyong Liow, of the College of Humanities and Social Science, Nanyang Technological University. The AOCAI interactive is housed within the NUS-LKYSPP’s Centre of Asia and Globalisation (CAG) website, with the latter being established nearly two decades ago in 2006 focusing on rigorous and impactful research on Asia in four broad areas: major power relations; globalisation and trade; geopolitics and technology; and international relations of Southeast Asia.
The Anatomy of Choice project seeks to answer four questions:
- What is it about the nature of the US-China rivalry that incentivizes them to press others—in Southeast Asia and beyond—to choose or take sides?
- How have the 10 Southeast Asian countries chosen or aligned themselves over time?
- What explains their alignment choices or positions?
- What are the implications for Southeast Asia, the superpowers, and the wider Asian region?
The AOCAI focuses on Question 2: it seeks to tap the alignment positions and movements of the SEA-10 between 1995-2024. It does this by examining five dimensions of the SEA-10 interactions with China and the U.S., namely, the political-diplomatic, military-security, economics, cultural affinity (or soft power) and positive/negative signals sent/received. Each of the five domains is weighted equally (20 percent) by default in the website. Within each domain, we have identified four indicators or measures of “alignment,” resulting in a total of twenty measures. A country’s alignment posture or position for a given year is derived by averaging out its alignment scores across the twenty measures. The alignment spectrum ranges from 0 to 100, with 0 indicating complete alignment with China, 100 with the U.S. We have also defined the 45-55 range as indicating those who are hedging or straddling the two superpowers. For details, see the Methods link.
We would like to acknowledge the contributions of our Senior Consulting Fellows, Herve Lemahieu, Director of Research at the Lowy Institute, Sydney, Australia, and Professor Kai Quek of The University of Hong Kong’s Department of Politics and Public Administration (HKU-PPA) in ensuring that the Index is both rigorous and robust. Dr. Lu Xi, a collaborator of the project and formerly an Assistant Professor at NUS-LKYSPP, and his research assistant Jun Jie Pei, also contributed important data for the United Nations General Assembly Voting Alignment indicator, through an algorithm which picks out the relevant datapoints from the database.
Ian Russell Koh, Research Associate since the project’s inception, currently a doctoral student at LKYSPP, played an instrumental role in the Index’s development – from brainstorming the indicators, gathering data, calculating the alignment ratios, to analysing the results. Paige Phuong-Huyen Nguyen, a PhD student at NUS’ Department of Political Science and King’s College London War Studies Department, also assisted with open-sourced research to gather the data for a handful of indicators, including Official Visits, Multilateral Groups, and Business Associations. Last but not least, the project’s post-doctoral fellows, Dr. Bich Tran and Dr. Andrew Ong, while preparing their book manuscripts, rendered invaluable ancillary support to the AOCAI in the gathering of data for some of the indicators.
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