Abstract
This paper presents a part of my PhD dissertation and refers to its hypotheses, the selected method approach and the first results of my analysis. The aim is to examine the attitude of the Russian state towards multilateral institutions.
In my work, I refer to Russia as a rising power that has sufficient material and non-material resources to challenge the status quo (defined based on the works of Stephen, 2014; Biersteker & Moret, 2015; Hurrell, 2006; Mazarr, 2017) , With regard to multilateral institutions, these states can generally pursue one of three strategies: active membership, neutrality or spoiler ratio (revisionism) (Kahler, 2013, Stephen, 2012, Culp, 2016, Mazarr, 2017). In my work, I make two additions to the existing literature.
First, I add data from so-called "soft-issue areas" since previous research is mainly based on data from the economic sphere. Secondly, I add a fourth pattern of behavior - "not interested".
Here, this behavior measures memberships in an institution that has been run without active interest (for example, based only on official speeches or interviews). Generally, I ask the following research questions: - What is Russia's attitude towards multilateral institutions? - Which factors can explain the observed attitude? On the basis of the existing literature, I have hypothesized that the Russian behavior in an institution depends on institutional factors (so-called "issue area", the liability of the decisions) as well as the position of Russia in this institution (strong or weak).
I test this hypothesis with text data extracted from the online archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry. The data consists of official speeches, statements, interviews with the Russian and foreign press, press releases, contracts and other official documents, which I call "entries".
In my analysis, I focus on the deviation from neutral entries, since neutrality is a norm for diplomatic language. A larger number of entries in combination with positive ones signal satisfaction.
Negative utterances and a generally low number of entries signify dissatisfaction. I developed software specifically for quantitative content analysis.
It examines each downloaded document and calculates the number of used positive, negative or neutral words and phrases (the assessment is based on a prepared list based on the coding of three native Russian speakers). Since the language being analyzed is Russian, linguistic peculiarities have also been included, such as personal endings.
The main results include deviation across time in some of the multilateral institutions (e.g. the Shanghai Cooperation Organization), expected prevalence of neutral entries, and a difference in attitude depending on the issue-area of an institution.