For long international affairs were considered the preserve of a small elite circle. In this world of security specialists, establishment pundits, and international representatives world politics was assumed to be high diplomacy, not town hall politics. This division between a publicly contested sphere of national politics and the elite-driven game of international relations – which was also taken for granted in much of the International Relations and European Integration literature – is becoming increasingly blurred. International institutions are frequently targeted by protests, face mounting public contestation, and their activities even become election issues. My paper aims to contribute to the research on the causes and consequences of this politicization of international institutions – i.e. their growing salience and contention in the public sphere – by providing an empirical analysis of patterns of public contestation for three major international governance arrangements. It asks whether the EU, the UN, and the G7/8 become more publicly contested over time and whether this politicization can be attributed to structural factors such as the increasing formal authority of these institutions or a cultural modernization which renders them visible to the public, or whether particular groups of political entrepreneurs play a crucial role. The empirical section builds on a quantitative text analysis of newspaper stories – drawn from the US, British, German and Swiss press over a sample period of 17 years (1993-2009). It demonstrates that patterns of politicization differ across countries and organizations. We observe varying politicization intensities, developments over time, a strong focus on decision-making bodies and an almost equal distribution of input and output criteria that are applied to the evaluation of the selected organizations.
