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 administrations 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’ networks. They are more often central actors in the survey network than in Twitter network, but in both networks, they constitute the primary source of issue-specific information.

We thank Susanne Helm for her research assistance during this project. Moreover, we would like to thank the members of the IPA research group, particularly Jörn Ege, for their thoughtful feedback on an earlier version of this article. The authors disclose

Climate governance,International public administration,Social network analysis,Survey data,Twitter data,United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

• Sociology - Social Sciences
• Political Science - Social Sciences