Global Performance Assessments and the Puzzle of Self-Sabotage

• In Event: Parties, Publics, and Governments

Abstract

Why do countries participate in rankings systems that cast them in a negative light? In recent decades, the rise of Global Performance Assessments (GPAs) has become a ubiquitous element of the international governance arena (Simmons and Kelley 2016). Often the handicraft of important multilateral organizations such as the OECD, the World Bank, or the United Nations, these GPAs seek to measure, evaluate, and rate countries on a host of metrics, ranging from educational performance to the attractiveness of their investment climate. GPAs can considerably influence the perceived success of nations, how foreign actors interface with them, and whether (and to what extent) they receive official development assistance.
We hypothesize that national-level politicians leverage GPAs to encourage policy centralization in two key ways. One is by comparing the performance of the nation relative to other countries that, by any reasonable standard, should not be doing as well as them, thus shaming the population into supporting national reforms. The other strategy is by comparing the performance of the nation to other countries that pose a geopolitical threat, thereby scaring citizens into advocating for national reforms. In both cases, we argue, national officials recognize that framing policy issues via GPAs can make citizens more supportive of centralized reforms. This provides a window for national policy capture. To test whether GPAs bolster support for centralized policymaking, we propose an original survey experiment in the United States that examines voter responses to GPAs in education using a nationally representative survey with experimental treatments designed to test our theory. The survey is currently in the field and we should have preliminary results by the end of September 2018.

Authors

• Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadon, Harvard University

• Emmerich Davies, Harvard University

• Thomas Gift, UCL