Peer-reviewed Articles:
Angel M. Villegas-Cruz. 2024. “The Effect of Economic Ties on Digital Diplomacy: A Sentiment Analysis of the Twitter Accounts of Chinese Diplomatic Missions.” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 1-35. https://doi.org/10.1163/1871191x-bja10194.
Abstract
The article examines how economic ties between host and guest countries affect the emotional valence in the social media content published by digital diplomats. Strong economic ties will lead digital diplomats to adopt a positive tone because such ties raise the potential costs of verbal aggressiveness online. A positive emotional valence on social media also serves to cultivate good public perceptions of the guest and its economic activities. To evaluate these claims, the article analyses 53,601 original tweets published by 88 Chinese diplomatic missions on Twitter from 2014 to 2020. It finds that economic ties have a strong positive effect on the tone adopted by digital diplomats. As the host’s trade dependence on China increases, Chinese diplomatic missions are more likely to adopt a positive tone on Twitter, especially when talking about politics and business. This research contributes to the study of how countries use social media to conduct diplomacy.Kevin Munger, Angel M. Villegas-Cruz, Jorge Gallego, and Mateo Vásquez-Cortés. 2024. “‘Reenviado Muchas Veces’: How WhatsApp Users in Mexico and Colombia Understand Political Information.” Political Communication 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2024.2326130.
Abstract
Digital literacy affects how people use the internet. However, we argue that the concept of “digital literacy” cannot usefully be applied to all internet users; there is simply too much heterogeneity across devices, platforms, and social contexts. We conduct surveys in Mexico and Colombia to understand how these people use the internet. We find that WhatsApp is by far the dominant platform across all sectors of society. In contrast to evidence from the US, we find that education is a better predictor of two measures of digital literacy than is age. We then conduct a survey experiment to test how people understand news shared on WhatsApp. We find that the inclusion of a link to source material increases respondents’ trust in a message shared on WhatsApp, but that the platform-supplied note that a message has been shared many times has no such effect.Angel M. Villegas-Cruz. 2014. “El discurso de la Iglesia Protestante en torno a la Segunda Guerra Mundial en la Revista Puerto Rico Evangélico, 1940-1945” [The representation of World War II in the inter-denominational magazine, Puerto Rico Evangelico, 1940-1945]. Revista [IN]Genios 1 (1): 1-11.
Abstract
El objetivo de este estudio es examinar la representación de la Iglesia Protestante sobre la Segunda Guerra Mundial a través de la revista, Puerto Rico Evangélico , entre los años 1940 a 1945. Este trabajo sostiene que la revista adopta una postura a favor de la participación de Estados Unidos y Puerto Rico en el conflicto bélico. El análisis fue desarrollado a partir de las teorías de representación y análisis de discurso del antropólogo social, Jack Goody, y el sociólogo, Stuart Hall. Toda la colección de la revista se encuentra en el Seminario Evangélico de Puerto Rico en Río Piedras.Editor-reviewed Publications:
Lucas Winter, Jason Warner, and Angel M. Villegas-Cruz. 2024. “Instruments of Chinese Military Influence in Argentina.” M-DIME Project. U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office.
Lucas Winter, Jason Warner, and Angel M. Villegas-Cruz. 2024. “Instruments of Russian Military Influence in Argentina.” M-DIME Project. U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office.
Angel M. Villegas-Cruz, “Male, U.S. Full History Professor, and China scholar: The recipe to get published in The Journal of Asian Studies, 2000-2020,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, November 15, 2022, https://doi.org/10.52698/KSEJ3511.
Book Reviews:
Angel M. Villegas-Cruz. 2024. “China and Its Small Neighbors: The Political Economy of Asymmetry, Vulnerability, and Hedging by Sung Chull Kim.” Pacific Affairs 97 (3).
Angel M. Villegas-Cruz. 2019. “读楼项飞《中国与拉美国家相互依赖模式研究》” [A Study of Sino-Latin American Interdependency Models by Lou Xiangfei]. Journal of BNU Public Administration 7.