Singing a different tune: How international organizations respond to crises

International organizations (IOs) are continuously scrutinized by member-states and civil society organizations alike. Global crises often prompt stakeholders to redirect their resources to newly-emerging issues and, in so doing, potentially reshuffle the order of global governance. How do IOs respond, literally, to such dynamics? In this paper, I study the role of public speeches, through which leaders of IOs market their services, demonstrate their expertise, and cater to the needs of their clientèle. I contend that leaders’ considerations regarding the content and form of public speeches resemble the rationale of producers deciding where to establish their business. Drawing on theories of spatial competition, I hypothesize that leader speeches should become more accessible—i.e., less complex linguistically—in times of crisis. Additionally, they should converge in terms of topics covered. To test my argument, I calculate measures of linguistic complexity and employ unsupervised text analysis on a new corpus of more than 2,000 speeches by the leaders of four IOs—the World Bank, the IMF, the WHO, and the UN. This work promises to advance our understanding of leadership in international relations by highlighting the importance of leader speeches