Interconnected bureaucracies? Comparing online and offline networks during global climate negotiations

Published date01 December 2021
Date01 December 2021
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/00208523211022823
Subject MatterSpecial Issue Articles
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Interconnected
bureaucracies?
Comparing online
and offline networks
during global climate
negotiations
Alexandra Goritz
Leipzig University and Freie Universit
at Berlin, Germany
Helge J
orgens
Iscte – Instituto Universita
´rio de Lisboa, Portugal
Nina Kolleck
Leipzig University and Freie Universit
at Berlin, Germany
Abstract
Measuring the influence of international public administrations has traditionally been
conducted with ‘offline’ data, using interviews, surveys or official documents. However,
an emerging strand of the literature argues that influence can also be observed ‘online’,
with data based on online social networks, such as Twitter. Our contribution aims at
bringing these two strands closer together. We triangulate offline data from a large-N
survey with online data from Twitter to examine to what extent they provide distinct
theoretical and methodological insights into the role of international public adminis-
trations in global governance. As a case study, we use the policy area of global climate
governance, an issue area where the influence of international public administrations
has raised increasing scholarly interest. Our findings show that international public
administrations occupy potentially influential positions in both ‘offline’ and ‘online’ net-
works. They are more often central actors in the survey network than in Twitter
Corresponding author:
Alexandra Goritz, Leipzig University – Institute of Political Science, Beethovenstraße 15, Leipzig 04109,
Germany.
Email: alexandra.goritz@fu-berlin.de
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00208523211022823
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
2021, Vol. 87(4) 813–830
network, but in both networks, they constitute the primary source of issue-specific
information.
Points for practitioners
First, online social networks provide practitioners with opportunities to connect and
interact with other political actors and help shape public discourse through communi-
cation. Second, online social networks provide important forums for societal actors
who aim to protect global public goods. Third, online social networks offer actors the
opportunity to shape values and norms, and to persuade persons or organizations
beyond one’s own circle. Therefore, it is particularly important that online communi-
cation strategies are carefully designed and implemented in view of their potential
power.
Keywords
climate governance, international public administration, social network analysis, survey
data, Twitter data, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Introduction
1
Scholars have used a variety of data sources to measure how bureaucracies of
international organizations (IOs) exert (latent) influence in global policymaking.
Particularly, document analysis (Biermann and Siebenhu
¨ner, 2009; Michaelowa
and Michaelowa, 2017), interviews with staff members (Jankauskas and
Eckhard, 2019; Well et al., 2020) or expert interviews and surveys with interna-
tional public administration (IPA) staff and stakeholders of specific regimes
(Busch et al., 2020; Saerbeck et al., 2020) have been popular among scholars of
public administration. Data sources from online social networks (OSNs), such as
Twitter, have only recently attracted the attention of IPA scholars (Bjola and
Zaiotti, 2020; Ecker-Ehrhardt, 2020; J
orgens et al., 2016; Kolleck et al., 2017).
Although data from OSNs have been available for many years, there are still only
few studies in the field of IPA that rely on them. In addition, the usefulness of the
data is still unclear for many scientists in the subject area so far. In this study, we
aim to discuss and analyse the opportunities provided by these data sources from a
theoretical and methodological perspective. Hence, the research question we aim
to answer is: to what extent can traditional data sources and online data offer
distinct insights into the role of IPAs?
To compare the usefulness of offline and online data, we use data from a survey
as well as data retrieved from the OSN Twitter. We measure the potential influence
of IPAs through techniques of social network analysis (SNA). This approach
allows us to infer influence from the position and relations of IPAs within
policy networks (Henry, 2011; Kenis and Schneider, 2011; Kolleck et al., 2017).
814 International Review of Administrative Sciences 87(4)

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT