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Bad science : international organizations and the indirect power of global benchmarking
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Broome, André, Homolar, Alexandra and Kranke, Matthias (2018) Bad science : international organizations and the indirect power of global benchmarking. European Journal of International Relations, 24 (3). pp. 514-539. doi:10.1177/1354066117719320 ISSN 1354-0661.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354066117719320
Abstract
The production of transnational knowledge that is widely recognized as legitimate is a major source of influence for international organizations (IOs). To reinforce their expert status, IOs increasingly produce global benchmarks that measure national performance across a range of issue areas. This article illustrates how IO benchmarking is a significant source of indirect power in world politics by examining two prominent cases in which IOs seek to shape the world through comparative metrics: (1) the World Bank–International Finance Corporation Ease of Doing Business ranking; and (2) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index. We argue that the legitimacy attached to these benchmarks because of the expertise of the IOs that produce them is highly problematic for two reasons. First, both benchmarks oversimplify the evaluation of relative national performance, misrepresenting contested political values drawn from a specific transnational paradigm as empirical facts. Second, they entrench an arbitrary division in the international arena between ‘ideal’ and ‘pathological’ types of national performance, which (re)produces social hierarchies among states. We argue that the ways in which IOs use benchmarking to orient how political actors understand best practices, advocate policy changes, and attribute political responsibility thus constitutes ‘bad science’. Extending research on processes of paradigm maintenance and the influence of IOs as teachers of norms or judges of norm compliance, we show how the indirect power that IOs exercise as evaluators of relative national performance through benchmarking can be highly consequential for the definition of states’ policy priorities.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Politics and International Studies | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | European Journal of International Relations | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Sage Publications Ltd. | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 1354-0661 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | September 2018 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 24 | ||||||||
| Number: | 3 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 514-539 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1177/1354066117719320 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 16 June 2017 | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 12 October 2017 | ||||||||
| Funder: | Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain) (ESRC) | ||||||||
| Grant number: | ES/K008684/1 | ||||||||
| RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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