Who Cares About IOs? Exploring the News Coverage of International Organizations Across the World

This paper uses large-scale automated text analysis to help open an important new research agenda concerned with the public visibility of international organizations (IOs). I propose that IOs’ public visibility – their media exposure – is driven by relative interest of countries in IOs’ work and operations. Although most IOs are primarily financed, and controlled, by great powers and high-income countries, I argue that their public visibility should be particularly high in countries in which they actually operate, typically low-income countries and LDCs. To evaluate the validity of the framework, I present a first truly global empirical account of the worldwide media coverage of more than 30 IOs. This account is based on automated analysis of online news text from across almost all states of the world, and a wide variety of more than 50,000 media outlets, in the year 2019. The uniquely rich dataset enables us to test the core theoretical proposition of the paper but also, for the first time, to relate the public visibility of a large number of diverse IOs to their important features, including their delegated authority.