Governance Indices, Politics and Expert Knowledge

Abstract

Since the early 1990s there has been a surge of international efforts to calculate the performance of states in terms of procedural aspects of governance such as democracy, corruption and administrative efficiency. More recently, there has been a renewed interest also on the outputs of governance: the old and established measurements of wealth and development (e.g. GDP and HDI) have been supplemented by attempts of measuring well-being, happiness and prosperity of nations (e.g the Stiglitz Commission and the Istanbul Declaration). While the panel welcomes all attempts to analyse the production, interpretation, diffusion and possible consequences of such numerical data explicitly designed for direct administrative purposes but implicitly serving as more indirect technologies of government that produce and reinforce – objectify – specific interpretations of reality, we particularly privilege analysis examining index-data from the perspective of expertise and/or politics.

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