News Media as Global Norm Entrepreneurs of Aid Transparency

• In Event: Interest, Need, and the Politics of Foreign Aid

Abstract

This paper aims to highlight the role of less formal non-state actors—particularly the news media and epistemic communities—in influencing international organizations (IOs) to adopt global norms. We specifically look at how these players influenced the World Bank (WB) to embrace the international aid transparency norm.

While several studies have already explored the significance of epistemic communities as norm entrepreneurs, the news media continues to be an understudied non-state actor in international relations. If considered at all, it is usually identified as a player within the nexus of domestic public opinion and foreign policymaking related to war or inter-state dispute. Our study contributes toward recognizing the significance, as well as the limits, of the news media in global norm socialization within international institutions.

We first argue that the news media and epistemic communities use different routes of influence. The former, given its internalized role as society’s watchdog, diffuses norms indirectly by setting the agenda of public discourse through its news outputs; the latter, on the other hand, are not purely external actors, as some experts are engaged directly by IOs due to their technical knowledge. Such interactions, however, are not only one-way, as IOs also exercise a powerful role in global governance and, thus, similarly dictate the discourse of the news media or epistemic communities.

We test these interactions empirically through time-series analyses of WB documents (n = 140,155), Google Books text corpus (n = 1,742,184), and New York Times coverage (n = 9,061) from 1975 to 2010, or the period leading up to the passage of the WB’s landmark Access to Information Policy (AIP).

In exploring the relationships between the WB and the news media or epistemic communities in enabling the aid transparency norm, we originally hypothesized two-way causal relationships between the internal discussion of aid transparency within the WB and the discourse of aid transparency in the news media/academic publications. However, we only found significant bidirectional relationships between academic discourse and Bank discussion. Thus, this mechanism of norm socialization involving epistemic communities does not work well with the news media. We expound several explanations: (a) the news media is not highly regarded as a technical expert by IOs; (b) IOs have a more solid relationship with epistemic communities, because the news media refrains itself from engaging with IOs due to its “watchdog” status; and (c) public intellectuals are seen as less adversarial compared with the news media.

We then further posit that negative news discourse about the Bank in general—not necessarily specifically about the non-adoption of the aid transparency norm—would lead the IO to internally discuss transparency issues. We found evidence that negative news about the WB in the New York Times Granger-caused the Bank to internally discuss transparency. This “shaming” process implies a complex route for the news media as a significant norm entrepreneur. Unlike the shaming strategies used by transnational activists, the news media’s negative coverage is not explicitly about the WB’s non-adoption of the transparency norm but about either the Bank’s grievous image (corruption) or the public’s critical reaction to the Bank’s image (protest). Nevertheless, such reports are highly related to issues of accountability, which can be addressed through transparency. Thus, this mechanism of norm socialization is much more nuanced than those implemented by other norm entrepreneurs.

A key assumption in our study is that the WB, like any IO, is a non-state actor, and its actions are done by international bureaucrats that may or may not be insulated from its member-states. This allows the IO’s consumption and diffusion of norms, thereby actively transforming its identity. We also view that, unlike defense or energy, aid transparency is not necessarily a priority among the Bank’s state-members, which enabled IO bureaucrats to be insulated from state control and, thus, influenced by public intellectuals and the news media. This norm socialization, however, is unique because the process does not go through formal IO representation, as some studies of non-state actor involvement would focus on. Because of this, it was imperative for us to use innovative measures in dealing with the formation and influence of ideas and norms in the public sphere.

In highlighting the role of an understudied non-state actor in international politics, we see that the area is fertile for media researchers to explore outside the realm of comparative politics and into international relations. At the same time, international relations scholars will find it productive to expand their research by exploring the role and mechanisms of the news media in global norm socialization. These agenda further call for an interdisciplinary approach in studying media effects in international organizations.

Authors

• Omar Dumdum, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Josephine Lukito, UW Madison