Exploring the hidden influence of international treaty secretariats: using social network analysis to analyse the Twitter debate on the ‘Lima Work Programme on Gender’

ABSTRACT

While there is little doubt that international public administrations (IPAs) exert autonomous influence on international policy outputs, scholars struggle with the problem of how to measure this influence. Established methods for assessing political influence are of limited use when focusing on international bureaucracies. The main reason is that IPAs do not explicitly state their policy preferences. Instead, they tend to present themselves as neutral administrators, aiming to facilitate intergovernmental agreement. They normally act ‘behind the scenes’. We propose social network analysis (SNA) as an alternative method for assessing the hidden influence of international treaty secretariats. SNA infers influence from an actor’s relative position in issue-specific communication networks. We illustrate the application and usefulness of this method in a case study on the role of the United Nations climate secretariat in a policy-oriented Twitter debate on incorporating gender issues into the global climate policy regime.

KEY WORDS:

• Climate politics
• environmental politics
• gender
• international organizations
• international public administration
• social network analysis

Acknowledgements

We thank Severin Sperzel for helping to collect and prepare Twitter data and Lukas Hakelberg for his contribution to a first draft of the methodological argument. We also thank Andrea Liese, Lisa Göldner, Steffen Eckhard, Christoph Knill, Arthur Benz, Andreas Corcaci, Jan Enkler, Ronny Patz, Julian Schibberges, Mareike Well and participants of the DFG Research Unit ‘International Public Administration’ for valuable comments. Finally, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and detailed comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Helge Jörgens is senior lecturer of comparative politics and managing director of the Environmental Policy Research Centre at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Nina Kolleck is assistant professor at the Freie Universität Berlin and head of the Institute of Educational Research and Social Systems.

Barbara Saerbeck is postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Environmental Policy Research Centre at the Freie Universität Berlin.

ORCID

Nina Kolleck http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5499-8617

Notes

1. The climate secretariat was created in 1996. Its main purpose is to provide scientific and logistical support to the bodies of the convention, in particular the COPs. Its major information channels are its website and social media profiles on Twitter and Facebook.

2. A network’s diameter refers to the longest path out of all shortest paths between any two vertices in a network.

3. Geodesic distance measures the number of edges in the shortest possible walk from one vertice to another.

4. Betweenness centrality measures the number of geodesics (shortest paths between pairs of vertices) that pass through a particular vertice. Eigenvector centrality measures how well a vertice is connected to other well-connected vertices. In-degree centrality measures the number of vertices that are directed into a vertice in a directed graph.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation under Grants FOR # 1745 JO 1142/1-1 and KO 4997/1-1.