The Politics of International Standards

• In Event: Collaboration on Trade Policy

Abstract

Increasingly, scholars acknowledge the power standards hold in regulating the international political economy. Yet, studying standards empirically has posed a challenge due to the complexity of the standardization process, as it involves the interaction of numerous actors and covers virtually every aspect of global relations. In this paper, I synthesize the literature on standards and present three dimensions of study; process, diffusion and outcomes of standards. To tackle these dimensions empirically, I present
an original dataset which structures multiple features of the standardization process, including the content of standards, the producers of standards, and the adopters of standards. The dataset in mainly collected by web scraping the webpages of the International Standardization Organization, thus also demonstrating how novel data collection methods can produce topic-relevant datasets. Finally, I demonstrate usage of the data through three cases. In short, this paper alleviates the challenge of empirically studying the process, diffusion and outcome of standards by presenting a comprehensive dataset on the topic, enabling a better understanding of how international standards regulate the international political economy.

Author

• Solveig Bjørkholt, University of Oslo