Bad science: International organizations and the indirect power of global benchmarking

Abstract

The production of transnational knowledge that is widely recognized as legitimate is a major source of influence for international organizations. To reinforce their expert status, international organizations increasingly produce global benchmarks that measure national performance across a range of issue areas. This article illustrates how international organization benchmarking is a significant source of indirect power in world politics by examining two prominent cases in which international organizations 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 international organizations 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 international organizations 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 international organizations as teachers of norms or judges of norm compliance, we show how the indirect power that international organizations exercise as evaluators of relative national performance through benchmarking can be highly consequential for the definition of states’ policy priorities.

The role of information and communication technologies in socioeconomic development: towards a multi-dimensional framework

“…International organizations are influential on socioeconomic development as they are endowed with substantial resources and can determine load conditions and organize bailouts for distressed economies (Broome, Homolar, & Kranke, 2017), thus having a major impact on availability of capital resources. Moreover, international organizations using international agreements may exercise power over particular countries and force changes to local government policies (Broome et al, 2017). As suggested by Béland and Orenstein (2013), international organizations frequently change their strategies and policies.…”

“…International organizations, such as the World Bank and OECD, produce global benchmarks that measure national performance across a range of issues. Such benchmarking can be a significant source of indirect power in world politics (Broome et al, 2017).…”

The Political Economy of ‘Tax Spillover’: A New Multilateral Framework

“…In the first section of the paper, we draw on the insight that it is common for current international benchmarks to have normative underpinnings (Broome and Quirk, 2015a, 2015b; Broome et al., ). Accordingly, our framework is minimally normative.…”

“…Normative criteria are often projected into many existing evaluation exercises by specifying appropriate conducts, behaviours and good practices (Broome and Quirk, 2015b). Measurement systems and forms of evaluation are difficult to meaningfully separate from their underpinning political values and preferences, frequently resulting in forms of ‘norm evaluation’ (Broome et al., ; Mügge, ). Consequently, choice of norm is usually prior in the construction of international benchmarks and multilateral evaluation frameworks.…”

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“…The creation of the Doing Business data set is one such way to create knowledge that is viewed as credible by policy-makers, and then used to inform policy decisions (Broome et al, 2017). Through the Doing Business data set, the World Bank is attempting to measure a part of the policy climate that is theorized to be essential for economic progress: business regulation (Besley, 2015).…”