Editors’ Note

Across the globe, the ability to collect and analyze large-scale data has grown significantly.This development not only deepens our understanding of societal dynamics, but also increasingly informs political decision-making and concrete policy interventions.In our first issue of 2026, we take readers from the United States and China to Indonesia, the Philippines, Algeria, Ghana, and Saudi Arabia, examining both large-scale trends and more nuanced phenomena within the political sphere.The issue's first article Liberties and Partisanship under Straining US-China Relations by Afiq bin Oslan (2026) examines how external threats and internal partisan polarisation shape public support for civil liberties.Using a survey experiment with U.S. citizens, respondents were exposed to partisan-attributed conflict scenarios involving China to assess whether co-partisan cues increase the willingness to trade civil liberties for national security.The results provide mixed evidence and do not conclusively show that co-partisans are more effective in encouraging the erosion of civil liberties during periods of external threat.With this article, Afiq bin Oslan contributes to a timely topic while U.S. President Donald Trump increasingly uses foreign policy to sway voters and deflect from policy issues at home.In the second article of this issue, Defense Spending Under Pressure: An ARDL Study of Indonesia's Economic and Strategic Realities, Muchamad Bachtiar, Bambang Irwanto and Trismadi Trismadi (2026) analyze the economic and geopolitical determinants of Indonesia's defense expenditure from 1984 to 2022.Using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to capture both short-and longterm dynamics, they depart from conventional measures.They do this by incorporating Indonesia's Total People's Defense and Security System (SISHANKAMRATA), accounting for defense-related spending across multiple ministries and thereby addressing systematic underestimation.The results show: short-term defense