A Thematic Exploration of the Changing Trends in Political Risk and Global Marketing Scholarship in the Last Three Decades (1986–2015): Implications and Future Research

This chapter analyzes temporal patterns in political risk across the globe and in global marketing scholarship in 1986–2015 to offer perspectives on emerging political risk issues for current and future research. We offer a novel measure of political risk based on exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to identify the most influential sources of political risk and its latent structure within a country in three time periods, 1986–1995, 1996–2005, and 2006–2015. This EFA-based measure provides a more nuanced way of analyzing global-, regional-, and country-level political risk dynamics compared to the existing indices based on the observable characteristics of political environment. We synthesize global marketing scholarship to examine the evolution of various research topics/themes within global marketing and identify potential future research directions on the impact of political risk on global marketing activities abroad.