Who Gets to Read What About IOs: a New Dataset on Worldwide Media Coverage of International Organisations

In recent years, the study of international organizations (IOs) has been increasingly turning to the attention paid to IOs by general publics and its consequences (e.g. Hooghe & Marks, 2009; Zürn et al., 2012). 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, most 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: on the variation in volume and sentiment of coverage 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.