Politics by Number: Indicators as Social Pressure in International Relations

The ability to monitor state behavior has become a critical tool of international governance. Systematic monitoring allows for the creation of numerical indicators that can be used to rank, compare, and essentially censure states. This article argues that the ability to disseminate such numerical indicators widely and instantly constitutes an exercise of social power, with the potential to change important policy outputs. It explores this argument in the context of the United States’ efforts to combat trafficking in persons and find evidence that monitoring has important effects: Countries are more likely to criminalize human trafficking when they are included in the U.S. annual Trafficking in Persons Report, and countries that are placed on a “watch list” are also more likely to criminalize. These findings have broad implications for international governance and the exercise of soft power in the global information age.Governmen

Introduction: The Power of Global Performance Indicators

In recent decades, IGOs, NGOs, private firms and even states have begun to regularly package and distribute information on the relative performance of states. From the World Bank\u27s Ease of Doing Business Index to the Financial Action Task Force blacklist, Global Performance Indicators (GPIs) are increasingly deployed to influence governance globally. We argue that GPIs derive influence from their ability to frame issues, extend the authority of the creator, and—most importantly —to invoke recurrent comparison that stimulate governments\u27 concerns for their own and their country\u27s reputation. Their public and ongoing ratings and rankings of states are particularly adept at capturing attention not only at elite policy levels but also among other domestic and transnational actors. GPIs thus raise new questions for research on politics and governance globally. What are the social and political effects of this form of information on discourse, policies and behavior? What types of actors can effectively wield GPIs and on what types of issues? In this symposium introduction, we define GPIs, describe their rise, and theorize and discuss these questions in light of the findings of the symposium contributions

Governance by Other Means: Rankings as Regulatory Systems

This article takes the challenges of global governance and legitimacy seriously and looks at new ways in which international organizations (IOs) have attempted to ‘govern’ without explicit legal or regulatory directives. Specifically, we explore the growth of global performance indicators as a form of social control that appears to have certain advantages even as states and civil society actors push back against international regulatory authority. This article discusses the ways in which Michael Zürn\u27s diagnosis of governance dilemmas helps to explain the rise of such ranking systems. These play into favored paradigms that give information and market performance greater social acceptance than rules, laws, and directives designed by international organizations. We discuss how and why these schemes can constitute governance systems, and some of the evidence regarding their effects on actors’ behaviors. Zürn\u27s book provides a useful context for understanding the rise and effectiveness of Governance by Other Means: systems that ‘inform’ and provoke competition among states, shaping outcomes without directly legislating performance

The Concept of International Delegation

This article defines and clarifies the concept of international delegation from both a legal and a social-science perspective. In this respect, its approach is similar to that of The Concept of Legalization, by Kenneth Abbott, Robert Keohane, Andrew Moravcsik, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Duncan Snidal.2 Although these authors properly treat international delegation as one component of legalization in international relations, delegation is worth considering separately because it raises unique issues. The factors that affect how one might classify international delegations may also differ from legalization more generally. Indeed, some factors may even weigh in opposite directions -- for example, precision indicates a high level of legalization, but it may indicate a low level of delegation. The article begins by presenting a definition of international delegation as a grant of authority by two or more states to an international body to make decisions or take actions. Next, it describes the types of international bodies to which states may grant authority. Much of the work on international delegation to date has focused on grants of authority to bureaucracies and courts. While we of course include these grants of authority in our analysis, our focus is broader, in that it also includes grants of authority to collective bodies and subgroups of states. The article then identifies eight types of authority that states may grant: legislative, adjudicative, regulatory, monitoring and enforcement, agenda-setting, research and advice, policy implementation, and redelegation. International bodies will often exercise more than one type of authority, and there will sometimes be uncertainties about whether a particular type of authority falls into a particular category. Distinguishing between the different types of authority is important, however, because many of the existing arguments and theories about delegation may not apply equally across the different types of authority delegated. Failure to appreciate the variety in the types of authority delegated may therefore lead to misleading generalizations. Next, the article discusses how the extent of an international delegation can vary depending on its legal effect and the degree of independence of the international body. These factors have not yet been systematically explored, although they modify the nature of delegation in significant ways. After developing the typology, the article considers some of the benefits and costs of international delegation in light of this typology. The article concludes with a discussion of some of the questions raised by the typology and its implications for further research

Testing for Negative Spillovers: Is Promoting Human Rights Really Part of the “Problem”?

The international community often seeks to promote political reforms in recalcitrant states. Recently, some scholars have argued that, rather than helping, international law and advocacy create new problems because they have negative spillovers that increase rights violations. We review three mechanisms for such spillovers: backlash, trade-offs, and counteraction and concentrate on the last of these. Some researchers assert that governments sometimes “counteract” international human rights pressures by strategically substituting violations in adjacent areas that are either not targeted or are harder to monitor. However, most such research shows only that both outcomes correlate with an intervention—the targeted positively and the spillover negatively. The burden of proof, however, should be as rigorous as those for studies of first-order policy consequences. We show that these correlations by themselves are insufficient to demonstrate counteraction outside of the narrow case where the intervention is assumed to have no direct effect on the spillover, a situation akin to having a valid instrumental variable design. We revisit two prominent findings and show that the evidence for the counteraction claim is weak in both cases. The article contributes methodologically to the study of negative spillovers in general by proposing mediation and sensitivity analysis within an instrumental variables framework for assessing such arguments. It revisits important prior findings that claim negative consequences to human rights law and/or advocacy, and raises critical normative questions regarding how we empirically evaluate hypotheses about causal mechanisms

The Power of Ranking: The Ease of Doing Business Indicator and Global Regulatory Behavior

The proliferation of Global Performance Indicators (GPIs), especially those that rate and rank states against one another, shapes decisions of states, investors, bureaucrats, and voters. This power has not been lost on the World Bank, which has marshaled the Ease of Doing Business (EDB) index to amass surprising influence over global regulatory policies – a domain over which it has no explicit mandate and for which there is ideological contestation. This paper demonstrates how the World Bank’s EDB ranking system affects policy through bureaucratic, transnational, and domestic-political channels. We use observational and experimental data to show that states respond to being publicly ranked and make reforms strategically to improve their ranking. A survey experiment of professional investors demonstrates that the EDB ranking shapes investor perceptions of investment opportunities. Qualitative evidence from India’s interagency EDB effort show how these mechanisms shape domestic politics and policy in the world’s second-largest largest emerging economy