Measuring Soft Power in International Relations

Soft power typically gets short shrift in foreign policy strategy because it is considered difficult to measure. To what degree do student-exchange programs matter to international politics? How exactly does a diaspora network affect a country's influence abroad? What are the foreign policy implications of hosting the Olympics? Can hit movies solidify alliances?

In response to this conundrum, Irene Wu has developed the Soft Power Rubric, an innovative framework that allows soft power to be quantified, as GDP is, supporting country comparisons, historical analysis, and global rankings. Composed of four indicators with publicly available data—immigration, study abroad, travel, and movies—the rubric identifies which countries in the world have the most soft power by the breadth and depth of their people-to-people relationships abroad.