The Nordics’ fear of the Russian bear - The Nordics’ threat perception of Russia’s military capacity as portrayed by media and the structural factors behind this picture

Abstract

Research has proved that structural factors influence how frequently certain issues are mentioned in media. However there has been no research on how structural factors influence a certain media picture, such as that of Russia’s military capacity. Based on that Russia is the Nordics’ significant other the aim of this thesis was to investigate the extent to which Russia’s military capacity was perceived as a threat in the Nordic countries, as portrayed by media. The aim was further to test what structural factors impacted this media picture. To achieve this aim a time-serious cross-sectional dataset was gathered. In addition to structural factors predicted to influence international relations this dataset included a measure of the media perception of Russia’s military capacity as a threat. This threat measure was based on a content analysis of articles published in Nordic newspapers 2004-2012. Russia’s military capacity was pictured as mostly a small but to some extent clear threat in Nordic newspapers. Further statistical analyses showed that Denmark is the outlier with the lowest level of perceived threat. Sweden has the highest average threat perception followed by Finland. Norway ended up in between. This was in line with the conclusion regarding the structural factors which showed that, on average, the stronger the historical memory of Russia as an enemy, the more threatful is the media picture of Russia’s military capacity. The result further indicated that, on average, the higher the trade with Russia is, the less threatful the media picture of Russia’s military capacity is.