The Politicisation of Global Economic Governance in the International Press

Various strands of the literature observe that the accumulation of political powers in the international realm is accompanied by an increased public awareness of international decision-making, a widening set of actors mobilizing on international questions, and diverging evaluations and expectations expressed in respective discourses. While sophisticated arguments on the nexus of international authority and such politicization dynamics exist, systematic empirical insights are still limited. Empirical research on the politicization of global governance arrangements has almost exclusively focused on the EU and we lack systematic data on other global governance arrangements that are consistent both across international organizations (IOs) and time. In this paper we approach the authority-politicization nexus in a comparative manner. First we go beyond the EU and scrutinize three core IOs in global economic governance – the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These three IOs can interfere with national sovereignty to different degrees and via different means which provides empirical leverage to scrutinize the authority-politicization nexus in greater detail. Second, we focus on the international press as one societal arena in which the politicization of these three IOs should become manifest. Our data is based on 36.930 articles published in three major international newspapers between 1992 and 2012. A semi-automated text analysis retrieves monthly indicators for IO visibility, the amount of non-governmental actors appearing in the IO-specific press reports, and the evaluations put forward in these texts. The resulting time-series cross-section data then allow us to link the aggregate trends in key politicization elements to variations in IO authority and its actual exercise.