Research on political instability, uncertainty and risk during 1953–2019: a scientometric review

We are now living in an integrated world full of abrupt political events and socio-political uncertainty. A comprehensive scientometric review in this aspect is useful but lacked in the existing literature. This paper fills the void by using VOSviewer and CiteSpace to systematically analyze the 4200 papers on “political instability”, “political uncertainty” and “political risk” during 1953–2019 from Web of Science Core Collection. We present the annual distribution of papers, the related disciplines, the mainstream journals, hot topics, references with the strongest citation bursts, recent publications with transformative potentials, as well as the collaboration networks of authors, organizations and countries. The hot spots include (1) the causes and impact of political instability, (2) the relationship among political uncertainty, energy price and macroeconomic/financial factors, and (3) the determinants of foreign direct investments. Rangan Gupta from University of Pretoria in South Africa has the most publications in this field, while Witold J Henisz from University of Pennsylvania in the USA has the most citations. As the first endeavor to do comparative study of easily confused terminologies with bibliometric analysis, we find that though literature on “political instability” and “political risk” appeared earlier and have larger volume, research on “political uncertainty” is currently more active and catching up fast. Keywords with on-going citation bursts, two thirds of active co-citation clusters, and potentially transformative papers published recently are all related to political/policy uncertainty. The three strands of literature have obvious overlap and meanwhile their own special foci. Graphic abstract Main areas of research on political instability, political uncertainty and political risk