International Organisations’ Worldwide Media Coverage: Who Gets to Read What about the Core Bodies of the Global Order

The core institutions of the current world order are increasingly challenged on several fronts: by the incoming rising powers, by political shifts within their core founding members, most notably the US, but also e.g. by powerful non-state actors. Much literature is devoted to how states, especially the great powers, perceive the institutions of global order, especially the most powerful organizations. Yet, the research on how these bodies are seen by the individuals and societal groups within the states is much scarcer (but see e.g. Hooghe & Marks, 2009; Zürn et al., 2012). At the same time, especially in democratic polities, this is a fundamental factors for the global bodies’ success and survival. As IOs wield power and political authority, their actions, outputs, and internal arrangements require legitimation increasingly not only in the eyes of their member states, but also in the eyes of the wider public. In line with that, new research studies such matters as the public image of IOs and how they care for it (Ecker-Ehrhardt, 2017, 2018; Rauh, 2018), public attitudes towards IOs across regions (Schlipphak, 2015), as well as IOs’ legitimation strategies and concerns (Gronau & Schmidtke, 2016). One important component of this research strand is the portrayal of IOs in mass media (Schmidtke, 2018). The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new, empirically uniquely broad dataset mapping media coverage of IOs. The dataset covers several dozen largest IOs, media outlets of the vast majority of the states of the world, and a wide variety of several dozen thousands media outlets, as covered in major news aggregators. Using automated text analysis, it measures how frequently IOs are referred to in online media and it assesses the sentiment of relevant text segments. The dataset is a part of a larger project on cross-border political information inter-connectedness. The paper outlines the conceptual and methodological core of the project and of the underlying dataset. It also provides descriptive and analytical insights into the overall patterns of attention paid to IOs, both across IOs and across countries. At this still early stage of the project, the paper actively seeks to develop links to other projects in this expanding field of research on IOs and the prospects of global order.