Vodka on ice? Unveiling Russian media perceptions of the Arctic

This article describes Russian Arctic policy agendas as they have been reflected in mainstream Russian media outlets. The research was based on modeling topic structures of three federal and three regional newspapers. Topic modeling was performed with the unsupervised LDA algorithm and complemented with hand labelling of topics. Data was collected by retrieval of relevant newspaper articles from the media database Integrum for the period 2011-2015 (N = 611); the corpus was further divided in two periods (2011-2013 and 2014-2015) to account for the potential effect of the Ukrainian crisis on agenda-setting. Both federal and regional newspapers were found to have been mostly concerned with the development of hydrocarbon resources, as coverage of this topic was the largest during both periods. However, during the second period (2014-2015), the repercussions of the Ukrainian crisis, namely the economic sanctions and securitization, gained significant attention while marginalizing other topics. The results of this analysis may serve as a foundation for application of sentiment analysis to allow an in-depth understanding of topic salience and impact on public opinion.