Elite Influence on International Politicization of Economic Organizations

• In Event: Elites and Public Opinion: Perception, Manipulation, Mobilization

Abstract

Given that public accountability of economic international organizations (IOs) is influential in establishing the legitimacy of the crucial policies they implement, the recent trend of politicization of IOs by political elites is alarming. While several studies have examined the effects of such politicization patterns on domestic audiences, less is known about whether the discourse of elites from powerful countries on IOs affects audiences beyond domestic borders, further diminishing support for IOs from the international audience.

Focusing on South Korea as a case study, where domestic elite cues on IOs are relatively sparser than in the US or European countries, I find that the influence of Trump’s rhetoric about IOs transcends borders, particularly through mass media coverage of influential countries’ leaders. To overcome the infrequent surveys of mass publics on economic IOs, I rely on online news comment data, an imperfect yet insightful source of public reactions to extreme elite rhetoric on economic IOs. By collecting comments from news videos that mention IOs—both economic and broader—before and during Trump’s presidency from major TV news channels in South Korea, I track whether individual attitudes toward the WTO (or IO leadership in general) have changed before and after Trump’s anti-WTO statements in a panel data setting (commenter-date).

Preliminary analyses from supervised text classification models suggest that (1) Trump’s statements successfully increased Koreans' negative perceptions of the WTO, and (2) such effects were observed among both liberals and conservatives. This study demonstrates that when influential political elites politicize IOs for their own or their country’s gain, international audiences may lose trust in IOs, even without domestic cues or elite discourses on IOs within a country.

Author

• Chloe Ahn, University of Pennsylvania