Academic freedom and international research collaboration: A longitudinal analysis of global network evolution

Abstract Amid a global wave of democratic backsliding, research collaboration across borders has become increasingly fraught. Yet, the international research collaboration (IRC) network continues to grow. This article analyzes the effects of academic freedom on the evolution of the IRC network in 166 countries from 1993 to 2022. Data are drawn from Web of Science to construct three longitudinal networks in science and technology (ST), the social sciences (SS), and the arts and humanities (AH). The Academic Freedom Index is drawn from the Varieties of Democracy Project, and stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOM) are used to analyze its effects on the “backbone” of the networks. The results show the significant direct effects and homophily effects of academic freedom on network evolution that vary in expected ways across research domains. However, the results also show a significant decline in academic freedom’s direct effect in the last decade. While the results provide evidence that countries with a strong culture of academic freedom were once critical to the evolution of the global network, this effect appears to be increasingly substituted by a sorting process between countries with similar levels of freedom and repression.