Accountability and Affective Styles in Administrative Reporting: The Case of UNRWA, 1951–2020

Abstract

This contribution theorizes on the emergence of affective styles in the accountability reporting of public agencies. Under conditions of multiple accountability towards heterogeneous stakeholders, public agencies are expected to make increased use of sentiment in their reporting. Agencies’ differentiated modulation of positive and negative sentiment results in four ideal-typical affective styles: technocratic; political; alarming; and self-praising. The plausibility of this framework is demonstrated for the case of a major international public agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which serves several million Palestine refugees. We conduct a dictionary-based sentiment analysis of UNRWA annual reports published between 1951 and 2020, a corpus of 1.47 million words. Additional evidence from interviews with UNRWA officials and diplomats is also considered. Over time, the agency’s use of sentiment has increased in response to diversifying stakeholders and its affective style of reporting has changed repeatedly. Contrary to established theoretical expectations, multiple accountability not only increases positive reporting and self-praise. Rather, with increasing levels of negativity, the alarming and political styles of communication have played a much stronger role. These findings demonstrate that agencies’ chief goal in accountability reporting is not simply to elicit positive assessments from their respective accountability forums through self-praising language. Agencies may also aim to achieve ‘negativity congruence’ with accountability forums by increasing negative sentiment, thus compelling stakeholders to acknowledge the operational challenges agencies face.

Explaining sentiment shifts in UN system annual reporting: a longitudinal comparison of UNHCR, UNRWA and IOM

“…Diverging from previous contributions (e.g. Breen et al, 2020;Busch and Pelc 2019;Duval et al, 2021), we argue that UN bureaucracies modulate positive and negative sentiment separately (Patz et al, 2021).…”

“…First, sentiment use is not purely a function of text genre or type of speaker (Gray and Baturo, 2021), and sentiment may be increased without the aim of increasing message diffusion (Duval et al, 2021;Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan, 2013). However, increased sentiment use in response to stakeholder expectation also makes these documents more political (Patz et al, 2021), which may increase their impact on public discussions (cf. Busch and Pelc 2019).…”

“…At the same time, IO bureaucracies cannot simply maximize sentiment use and turn administrative reporting entirely into political discourse as this would increase critical scrutiny by diverse stakeholders (Patz et al, 2021). Thus, IO bureaucracies need to strategically and selectively modulate their use of positive and negative sentiment to speak to their different stakeholders.…”

“…First, UNHCR has had a higher positive sentiment share than UNRWA over almost the entire history of both agencies, which could indicate greater resource-mobilization needs by UNHCR. For UNRWA, shifts in donor community and expectations have meant that it has had to increase fundraising efforts since the mid-2000s (Patz et al, 2021).…”

“…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".…”