How Media Coverage Shapes the Effect of IOs on Public Attitudes

• In Event: IOs and International Order

Abstract

This paper relies on original news media data and a nationally representative survey to estimate the causal effect of a seminal 2022 United Nations resolution condemning Russia on mass attitudes toward the Russian government in 78 countries. Leveraging the exogenous timing of the United Nations resolution, which was adopted while the survey was in the field, we find that the United Nations influence public opinion, that news media exhibit strong variation in how they cover the institution, and that this variation in media coverage shapes how publics around the world respond to signals from the United Nations.

A large literature shows that international organizations shape public attitudes when they publicly endorse or condemn political actors or actions (see, e.g., Chapman, 2011; Bearce and Cook, 2018; Schneider, 2019; Mikulaschek, 2023). Studies on the signaling effect of international organizations have in common that they black box the question how the media transmit signals from international organizations to mass publics. This is problematic insofar as we know that news media vary in terms of how they report international news, and that news media coverage affects public attitudes (DellaVigna and Kaplan, 2007; Baum and Groeling, 2010). We argue that the impact of international organizations’ decisions on salient political issues varies depending on how the media conveys them to the public. Building on elite cue theory (Zaller, 1992), we expect that news media coverage that emphasizes vocal dissent by a minority of member states conveys two conflicting cues (from the majority and minority in the organization) to the public and thereby diminishes the mass attitudinal impact of the organization’s signal.

We test this argument by analyzing the causal effect of a seminal 2022 United Nations General Assembly resolution, which condemned Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, on public attitudes about Russia in 78 countries. To conduct this event response study, we leverage the fact that the United Nations condemned Russia while Gallup had a survey in the field around the world. This research design opportunity enables us to estimate the impact of the United Nations’ condemnation on mass opinion about Russia by comparing survey responses gathered just before the United Nations decision to those interviews conducted shortly after this event. To analyze how media coverage of the United Nations resolution shaped the public’s response, we leverage this survey and original data on media coverage in 166 countries and in 64 languages. We overcome endogeneity in news reporting by exploiting news pressure (Eisensee and Strömberg, 2007) as a source of exogenous variation in media coverage of the United Nations resolution. We find that the global news media devoted substantial attention to the condemnation of Russia by the United Nations. At the same time, we detect strong variation in how this news story was reported. In turn, the United Nations decision shaped public attitudes about Russia – but only in those countries where media intensely covered the condemnation of aggression against Ukraine. Further analyses examine the mass attitudinal effect of whether a country’s news media emphasize Russia’s condemnation or divisions in the international community over Russia’s use of force.

Our study makes several contributions. First, it yields the insight that a single signal from a given international organization will have diverging effects on public audiences exposed to different mass media cues. By showing that the impact of international institutions on public attitudes is contingent on how the news media covers international organizations, the study speaks to large literatures on signals from international organizations to mass publics. Second, this study contributes to United Nations scholarship by conducting the first analysis of the impact of a General Assembly resolution on public opinion. The finding that the General Assembly can shape mass political attitudes on salient topics plausibly explains a puzzling pattern observed by previous studies: Even though General Assembly resolutions are non-binding and cannot be enforced, great powers make costly side payments to win votes in this institution (Dreher and Sturm, 2012; Carter and Stone, 2015). More generally, this finding enhances our understanding of naming and shaming in world politics (Terman and Byun, 2021; Tingley and Tomz, 2022). Finally, the study contributes to mass media scholarship: it introduces new data on media coverage around the world as well as a new measure of news pressure, which has only been studied in the United States to date.

Authors

• Christoph Mikulaschek, Harvard University

• Michal Parizek, Charles University