From Principle to Percentile: Federal Poverty Guidelines and the Metrication of Criminal Indigency

• In Event: Law and Political Economy

Abstract

States increasingly govern through numbers, yet we know less about how rights themselves become quantified. How does the state convert open-textured rights into rules that can be administered at scale? I advance the concept of metrified rights, where policymakers import external administrative indicators to operationalize constitutional guarantees or entitlements. Metrified rights differ from performance indicators and algorithms because the metric here allocates the right in ways that curtail frontline discretion. Using event-history models of the state-level adoption of Federal Poverty Guidelines for indigency screening, I explore the diffusion mechanisms and sociopolitical conditions through which numerical metrics come to govern access to counsel in criminal cases. Findings suggest that adoption occurs earlier in states where public defender coalitions are stronger, yet is also driven by fiscal austerity concerns in later periods. By defining metrified rights as the use of external administrative indicators to allocate entitlements, this study links quantification and commensuration to concrete institutional changes, showing how metrics reallocate discretion upwards and reframe social science debates about discretion, equity, and governance by numbers.

Author

• Kevin Dahaghi, Rutgers University-New Brunswick