Affective Language in IO Bureaucracy Reporting: Explaining Sentiment Shifts in Annual Reporting of UNHCR, UNRWA and IOM

IO bureaucracies, just like national public administrations, have regular reporting obligations to key stakeholders, including political principals and the public at large. While the inclusion and exclusion of information in bureaucratic reporting has previously been theorized, theories on how different IO bureaucracies use affective language to frame accountability reporting is just emerging. Combining a multiple stakeholder perspective to public agency accountability from Public Management and Public Administration with recent advances in conceptualizing affective language use in IOs, this contribution tests whether IO bureaucracies use negative and positive sentiment in a differentiated way to strategically respond to divergent stakeholder concerns. Based on three novel text corpora of annual reports produced by the bureaucracies of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA, reports published from 1951-2019), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 1953-2019) and the International organization for Migration (IOM, 1999- 2019), we conduct a dictionary-based sentiment analysis. Our findings suggest that sentiment variation reflects different and changing operational realities of the three IO bureaucracies, notably the administrative links between headquarters and the field as well as the challenges faced at field and global level. We identify a trend towards a significant increase in affective language use in all three IO bureaucracies that correspond to the increasing competition for resources and for attention with various key stakeholder audiences.