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Why do citizens support or reject the idea of global authority? The paper addresses this question by examining individual attitudes about UN authority in a comparative perspective. According to the main argument put forward in this paper, we may think of the formation of citizens' support for international authority as a two-step process. First, the paper theorizes the formation of global attitudes about the UN according to a process of cognitive mobilization. Using data from the fifth wave of the World Values Survey (2005-2007), I find strong empirical support for the role of individual attention to public cues for the relevance of the UN in rising global awareness of UN authority. In the second step, the paper examines how cognitively mobilized citizens use available information to make up their minds about UN authority. The analysis shows that global public support for UN authority largely depends on a cosmopolitan understanding of global interdependence and moral universalism. However, the analysis of contextual variables also suggests that a "particularist" calculus of national costs and benefits explains citizens' support for (and rejection of) UN authority to a remarkable extent.

AbstractCommunication departments of international organizations (IOs) are important intermediaries of global governance who increasingly use social media to reach out to citizens directly. Social media pose new challenges for IO communication such as a highly competitive economy of attention and the fragmentation of the audiences driven by networked curation of content and selective exposure. In this context, communication departments have to make tough choices about what to communicate and how, aggravating inherent tensions between IO communication as comprehensive public information (aimed at institutional transparency)—and partisan political advocacy (aimed at normative change). If IO communication focuses on advocacy it might garner substantial resonance on social media. Such advocacy nevertheless fails to the extent that it fosters the polarized fragmentation of networked communication and undermines the credibility of IO communication as a source of trustworthy information across polarized "echo chambers." The paper illustrates this argument through a content and social network analysis of Twitter communication on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). Remarkably, instead of facilitating cross-cluster communication ("building bridges") Twitter handles run by the United Nations Department of Global Communications (UNDGC) seem to have substantially fostered ideological fragmentation ("digging the trench") by their way of partisan retweeting, mentioning, and (hash)tagging.

International organizations increasingly use social media to target citizens with an abundance of content, which tends to stylize officials across ranks as the "personal face" of institutional processes. Such practices suggest a new degree of access to the every day of multilateralism that has traditionally taken place on camera and with the aid of diplomatic discretion. What is more, in these practices the intuitive truth of images on social media often blends with a more credible expression of emotional states—such as enthusiasm, sympathy, anger, or shame—which facilitates the legitimation of international organizations as credible agents of shared values and norms. At the same time, however, such personalization arguably suggests a problematic dependency on the credible conduct of international organization officials as it might undermine institutional claims to depersonalized "rational-legal" authority in international politics and local arenas of implementation alike. Also, it aggravates existing problems of decoupling action in global governance from its political symbolism, because international organizations use social media by and large to communicate "top-down," despite claiming a more personal mode of communication among peers. To illustrate this argument, the article takes on content shared by leading officials of the UN, the IMF, the WHO, and the WTO on Twitter.

Internationale Organisationen (IOs) haben die Nutzung sozialer Medien über die letzten Jahre massiv verstärkt. Mit diesem Trend lassen sich weitreichende Hoffnungen verbinden, die von erhöhter Transparenz über effektivere Advocacy bis hin zu einer breitenwirksamen (Selbst)Legitimation internationalen Regierens reichen. Doch wie gehen IOs mit den neuen Möglichkeiten sozialer Medien tatsächlich um? Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass soziale Medien eine Reihe problematischer Anreize für IO-Öffentlichkeitsarbeit setzen. Diese bedingen neue Aporien bzw. verstärken alte und definieren damit einen erheblichen Forschungsbedarf für die Internationalen Beziehungen (IB). Der Beitrag illustriert dies anhand von fünf Aporien: der Beschleunigung von IO-Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, ihrer Personalisierung durch die verstärkte öffentliche Präsenz von Führungspersonal, ihrer verstärkten Selektivität bezüglich kommunizierter Inhalte, ihrer problematischen Emotionalisierung im Kontext advokatorischer Kampagnenkommunikation sowie des Problems polarisierender Fragmentierung entlang ideologischer Konfliktlinien.