Power and the Global Flows of Political Information

This article presents a novel theoretical model and the first comprehensive empirical account of the flows of political information across states globally. Existing studies that estimate quantitatively the intensity of the flows of information across nations typically focus on the Western states and highlight a range of predictors of the information flows. In contrast, we put the material power of states and their power status at the center of the theoretical inquiry. We formulate specific observable implications of our theorizing, concerning variability across topics news and news sentiment. We test the framework with the use of a uniquely sizable dataset of online news media content across more than 150 states and 61 languages, spanning close to 5 million news articles in the years 2018-2021. We use a combination of lexicons, fine-tuned deBERTa models, and generative AI-enabled tools to trace how frequently and how individual countries are reported on in news media in most other countries of the world. The results demonstrate that material power of the reported-on nations is by far the strongest predictor of information flows and that this pattern holds across all news topics, even more strongly in economics and science and technology reporting than in politics. This is further associated with an on-average poorer sentiment of reporting on weaker states, compared to the more powerful states. In the long-term, these patterns of information flows are likely to strengthen and reify the power asymmetries of the international system.