Information & Influence. GINC's Emerging National Assessments

From mass communication to the digital age, national power has been shaped by the ability to shape narratives, sustain trust, and influence perception. Information and influence operate through societies, cultures, and networks that extend far beyond borders.

Information & Influence comprises the capabilities through which a nation forms and sustains its national identity and social cohesion, projects cultural and linguistic presence internationally, mobilises people-to-people exchange and diaspora networks, and participates credibly in global diplomatic and informational systems. These capabilities shape a country’s soft power, legitimacy, and resilience against manipulation or coercion, while influencing its ability to build alliances, attract talent, maintain trust in institutions, and operate effectively within an increasingly fragmented and contested information environment.

This research note provides a structured assessment of national capability in information and influence across multiple dimensions. It introduces the domain and its strategic significance, presents comparative national assessments using Pareto frontier methodology, and examines each of GINC’s core capability areas—including national identity and cohesion, language and exchange networks, diplomatic reach, diaspora engagement, information integrity, and cultural influence. The analysis incorporates comparative country profiles, scenario testing and sensitivity analysis, and exploration of structural patterns and correlations across capabilities, situating the results within existing national strategy frameworks and published definitions of information power and influence.

Contents

Introduction
National Assessments
Capability Groups
National Case Studies
Scenarios and Sensitivity Analysis
Data and Definitions

Information & Influence is one of nine domains assessed within the National Capability Framework and a core component of the Soft Power pillar. It aggregates a structured set of underlying capabilities that together describe how nations form internal cohesion, project values externally, and shape perceptions, narratives, and trust across borders. Unlike material or technological domains, Information & Influence operates through societies, institutions, networks, and cultural systems, making it both diffuse and deeply consequential to national power and resilience.

GINC’s Information & Influence framework organises these capabilities into six capability groups, spanning domestic foundations of cohesion and trust, international people-to-people and diplomatic networks, diaspora reach, information integrity, and cultural projection. Each group is composed of multiple sub-capabilities that capture both capacity and effectiveness—for example, not only the scale of diplomatic or diaspora networks, but their ability to set agendas, sustain engagement, and exert influence in contested environments. This structure provides a standardised taxonomy that maps to published national strategies on soft power, public diplomacy, information resilience, and societal cohesion, enabling systematic comparison across diverse political systems and strategic approaches.

Figure 1 presents an overview of the Information & Influence domain and its underlying capability groups. Together, these capabilities describe how nations cultivate shared identity and civic trust at home; extend language, education, and exchange networks abroad; mobilise diaspora communities; protect the integrity of their information environment; and project cultural presence through media, heritage, and global events. Assessed collectively, they offer a comprehensive view of national influence that complements traditional measures of power by capturing legitimacy, attraction, narrative reach, and societal resilience in an increasingly fragmented global information landscape.

Figure 1. Information & Influence Domain Overview

Source. GINC Data Laboratory, January 2026

Emerging National Assessments

GINC’s emerging national assessments use synthetic expert simulations to evaluate each nation across individual information and influence capabilities. For every capability, countries are assessed against a structured rubric ranging from No Plans (NP)—indicating no evident intent or capacity to develop the capability—through to AAA, representing performance at the global frontier in influence, reach, or resilience.

Capability Groups, such as National Identity & Social Cohesion or Information & Influence Integrity, aggregate the underlying capability ratings to reflect a group’s overall strength. Within the Information & Influence domain, these groups comprise between three and four individual capabilities, capturing both domestic foundations—such as civic trust and resilience—and outward-facing instruments, including diplomacy, diaspora engagement, media reach, and cultural projection.

At the domain level, GINC expresses national capability in Information & Influence using the Pareto frontier, which evaluates countries based on whether they dominate, or are dominated by others across all underlying capabilities. Rather than relying on weighted indices, the Pareto approach organises countries into peer groups, or Tiers, according to their relative position, balance, and distance from the influence frontier. This method highlights not only leaders in specific areas, but the structural breadth and coherence required to sustain national influence in an increasingly contested global information environment.

Figure 2. Information & Influence Capability Tiers

Source. GINC Data Laboratory, January 2026

Further analysis of the Pareto frontier highlights the nuanced patterns of influence dominance among top-tier nations in the Information & Influence domain. The capability domination matrix below illustrates these relationships in detail. To read the matrix: each cell shows how many information and influence capability groups the column country dominates the row country in. Dominance occurs when the column country scores strictly higher than (not equal to) the row country across a given capability group—such as national identity and cohesion, diplomatic networks, diaspora influence, information integrity, or cultural reach. For example, if the United States (column) versus Germany (row) displays a value of 4, this indicates that the United States outperforms Germany in four of the six Information & Influence capability groups. Diagonal cells marked with “–” represent a country compared to itself. This matrix provides a more granular view of competitive positioning than tier assignments alone, revealing not only which nations lead overall, but where specific countries hold relative advantages or vulnerabilities across the influence landscape.

Figure 3. Capability Domination Matrix: Cross-National Performance Comparison

Source. GINC Data Laboratory, January 2026

Capability Groups

Information & Influence is one of nine domains within the National Capability Framework and a core component of the Soft Power pillar. It comprises a structured set of capabilities organised into six capability groups that together capture how nations build internal cohesion, project influence externally, and sustain credibility and trust across borders. GINC’s framework provides a standardised taxonomy for assessing information and influence capabilities, enabling systematic cross-national comparison across diverse political systems, cultures, and strategic approaches. Figure X presents the top five nations in each capability group, ranked by average capability score, highlighting relative strengths across domestic foundations, diplomatic networks, information integrity, and cultural reach.

Figure 4. Top 5 Nations by Capability Group

Source. GINC Data Laboratory, January 2026

Information & Influence capability groups exhibit a mix of clear leadership and tightly clustered second tiers across the domain. Cultural Reach & Influence shows the strongest separation at the top, with the United States leading, followed closely by South Korea, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan in a narrow band. In Diaspora & Global Communities, the United States again leads, with China close behind and Israel, India, and the United Kingdom forming a compact second group. Diplomatic & Global Networks display particularly tight clustering beneath the leader, with Sweden, China, Japan, and Singapore grouped closely behind the United States. Information & Influence Integrity shows a similar pattern, with the United States narrowly ahead of Israel, China, South Korea, and Sweden. Language & People-to-People Exchange is led by the United States, followed by Singapore and a tightly clustered European group comprising Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. In National Identity & Social Cohesion, leadership shifts to smaller, highly cohesive states, with Finland at the top, followed closely by Norway, Estonia, Denmark, and Switzerland.

Examining patterns across the six capability groups and the 15 nations appearing in Tiers 1, 2, and 3 reveals distinct national profiles rather than uniform dominance. Some countries demonstrate broad, balanced strength across domestic cohesion, diplomacy, and cultural reach, while others achieve frontier positions through concentrated excellence in specific areas such as information integrity, diaspora engagement, or global cultural presence. This distribution illustrates the three capability profiles—Balanced, Asymmetric, and Specialised—introduced earlier, and highlights how Pareto dominance in Information & Influence reflects performance across multiple, interdependent dimensions rather than reliance on a single source of soft power or influence.