The legitimation of international organizations in the media in Eurasian post-socialist countries

The paper presents the first-ever big data analysis related to the legitimation of international organizations (IOs) in the media in Eurasian post-socialist countries. We use text mining and regression analysis to quantify intensity, tone, and narrative in the media as three critical dimensions of legitimation. The model is applied to a corpus of 1.3 million newspaper articles from six countries and twelve IOs. We show that contrary to earlier studies covering established democracies, the tone of articles about IOs is predominantly positive. Articles mentioning influential domestic politicians contribute to the delegitimation of the IOs featured, except in Poland.