Explaining sentiment shifts in UN system annual reporting: a longitudinal comparison of UNHCR, UNRWA and IOM
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Ronny Patz,Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/00208523211029804 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
Explaining sentiment shifts
in UN system annual
reporting: a longitudinal
comparison of UNHCR,
UNRWA and IOM
Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir
TU Munich, Germany
Ronny Patz
Hertie School gGmbH, Germany
Abstract
Annual reports are a central element of international bureaucracies’accountability com-
munication to member states and other stakeholders. Most UN system bureaucracies
produce reports of significant length and detail. International agencies use these reports
to draw attention to particular challenges or successes. Hitting the right tone with their
diverse stakeholders is crucial to maintain continued support. UN agencies do so by
employing differentiated sentiment-loaded language alongside factual reporting. We
argue that agencies’operational focus, administrative structures and resource mobiliza-
tion needs have a significant impact on how they use sentiment to communicate with
different stakeholder groups. Drawing on a dictionary-based sentiment analysis of
three text corpora of annual reports produced by three UN system agencies—
UNRWA (reports published from 1951 to 2019), UNHCR (1953–2019) and IOM
(2000–2019)—we show a general trend toward increased positive sentiment use across
all three agencies, coinciding with a period of stronger donor orientation. At the same
time, we find a more volatile and agency-specific use of negative sentiment in response
to field-level challenges that are communicated to stakeholders in line with agencies’
evolving mandates. Through a text-as-data perspective, this contribution enhances our
comparative understanding of the diverse and context-dependent language of interna-
tional bureaucracies.
Corresponding author:
Ronny Patz, Hertie School gGmbH, Friedrichstraße 180, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
Email: patz@hertie-school.org
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2021, Vol. 87(4) 794–812
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00208523211029804
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
Points for practitioners
Reading UN agency reporting, practitioners need to be aware of the constraints and
incentives that international bureaucrats face—notably operational focus, administrative
structures and resource needs—that drive tone differences across reports and over
time.
Keywords
accountability, annual reporting, international organizations (IGOs), International Public
Administration, IOM, sentiment analysis, UNHCR, United Nations, UNRWA
Introduction
Regularly reporting back to member states and other stakeholders is a standard task
of the bureaucracies of international organizations (IOs). In the United Nations
(UN) system, most agencies produce substantive annual reports, which are made
available to central stakeholders, such as member states, as part of regular account-
ability procedures.
1
These annual reports present information about agencies’activ-
ities and performance in the previous year and, as mostly public documents, are
often read with keen interest by critics and supporters alike. As routine bureaucratic
exercises focused on internal accountability, annual reports could be expected to be
technocratic administrative documents written in a diplomatic and technical lan-
guage. Their prime readership groups include member state diplomats, UN
experts and specialized non-governmental organizations, which suggests that con-
cerns for accuracy and performance-reporting should be more important than read-
ability and public attention.
However, UN annual reports not only increasingly employ visual elements (Johnson,
2011), but frequently also involve the use of sentiment-loaded language (Patz et al.,
2021). An agency may highlight its successes and positive contributions, underscoring
how it “was able to rapidly and effectively deliver development and humanitarian
assistance by drawing on its operational strengths”. Conversely, it may contrast this
with a focus on the challenging environment it faces, such as “financial constraints
[that] affected the delivery of emergency services […] triggering severe protests”
(both quoted from §20 in UNRWA 2019,
2
our emphases). This use of sentiment-loaded
language in accountability reporting is puzzling from a public administration perspec-
tive as increased sentiment use increases public attention (cf. Stieglitz and
Dang-Xuan 2013), which may increase scrutiny and responsibility attribution that IOs
do not like (Louis and Maertens, 2021, Chapter 6). The central questions are thus
why UN agencies use sentiment in their administrative annual reporting, whether
there are common trends across UN agencies and what factors explain differences
across agencies and over time.
While previous research on sentiment use by public administrations has focused
on the effect of sentiment in press releases on media reporting (Duval et al., 2021)
or sentiment congruence in the news room (Meyer-Gutbrod and Woolley, 2021),
Thorvaldsdottir and Patz 795
To continue reading
Request your trial