Lord W. Runciman and His Diplomatic Mission in the Pages of the Local English Periodical Press in the Context of British Political Statistics

The subject of the study is the representation of Lord W. Runciman’s diplomatic mission to Czechoslovakia in 1938 in the English regional periodical press, as well as the identification of patterns in the distribution of references to the politician in newspapers across various counties of Great Britain. The author examines how the intensity of references to Runciman correlates with a number of socio-political and economic characteristics of the regions, including the results of the 1935 parliamentary elections, levels of electoral participation and unemployment, and the geographical location of the counties. Particular attention is paid to determining whether press coverage had a local character or whether the mission was perceived as a nationwide foreign policy event. Chronologically, the study is limited to the period from 25 July to 3 August 1938, from the first mentions of the mission in the press to Runciman’s arrival in Prague. Content analysis was used, involving automated counting of references within a corpus of newspaper texts and statistical data processing. The results were visualized using Python scripts developed by the author. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the application of quantitative methods of analysis, including program-based text processing, to the study of the regional British press in the context of the Runciman Mission. In the course of the research, three hypotheses were tested: the existence of a correlation between the frequency of references to the statesman and – unemployment levels; the results of the most recent parliamentary elections; the level of electoral participation. None of these hypotheses were confirmed. At the same time, a stable geographical pattern was identified, namely a higher frequency of references to Runciman in the northern counties of England. This pattern, however, can be logically explained by the politician’s origins and the fact that the early stage of Runciman’s career was closely connected to the English North. The study concludes that the mission generated significant public resonance while simultaneously retaining a distinct regional specificity in its coverage.