15:30 - 17:45
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Anna Gwiazda
Discussant/s:
Jonas Bunte, Liana Minkova
Meeting Room L

Michal Parizek
Who cares about IOs? Exploring worldwide visibility of international organizations in media

Anna Gwiazda, Liana Minkova
The Istanbul Convention and Gender Politics: A Comparative Analysis of Bulgaria and Poland

Markus Tepe, Pieter Vanhuysse, Michael Jankowski
COVID Vaccine Alliance Building Blocks. A Conjoint Experiment on Popular Support for Institutional Design Principles

Jonas Bunte
Internal Divisions within Governments and International Cooperation
Who cares about IOs? Exploring worldwide visibility of international organizations in media
Michal Parizek
Charles University

This paper uses large-scale automated text analysis to explore the patterns of online media visibility international organizations (IOs). I develop a theoretical framework in which IOs’ visibility in media is driven by relative interest of countries in the IOs’ work and operations. Most IOs are primarily financed by great powers and high-income countries, and these exercise formal and informal control over them. But I argue that IOs’ media visibility is particularly high in countries in which they actually operate, typically low-income countries and LDCs. A mismatch between de facto control and public information within mechanisms of IOs’ accountability ensues. To evaluate the validity of the framework, I present a first truly global empirical account of the worldwide online media coverage of more than 50 IOs, including most major ones. This account is based on an automated analysis of news text from across almost all states of the world, and a wide variety of more than 30,000 online media outlets, in the years 2019-2020. The uniquely rich new dataset enables me to test the core theoretical propositions of the paper but also, for the first time, to relate the public visibility of such a large number of diverse IOs to their important features, including their delegated authority.