Project Details
Projekt
Quantification, Administrative Capacity and Democracy
Subject Area
Political Science
Accounting and Finance
Accounting and Finance
Term
from 2016 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 278853747
Numbers increasingly govern public services. Both policymaking activities and administrative control are increasingly structured around calculations such as cost-benefit analyses, estimates of social and financial returns, measurements of performance and risk, benchmarking, quantified impact assessments, ratings and rankings, all of which provide information in the form of a numerical representation. Through quantification, public services have experienced a fundamental transformation from government by rules to governance by numbers, with fundamental implications not just for our understanding of the nature of public service itself, but also for wider debates about the nature of citizenship and democracy. This project scrutinizes the relationships between quantification, administrative capacity and democracy across three policy sectors (health/hospitals, higher education/universities, criminal justice/prisons) and four countries (France, Germany, Netherlands, UK). It offers a cross-national and cross-sectoral study of how managerialist ideas and instruments of quantification have been adopted and how they mattered. More specifically, it examines (i) how quantification has travelled across sectors and states; (ii) relations between quantification and administrative capacity; and (iii) how quantification has redefined relations between public service and liberal democratic understandings of public welfare, notions of citizenship, equity, accountability and legitimacy. The project shall be carried out under the Open Research Area (ORA) programme and is performed by a network of research institutions from France, Netherlands, UK and other partners from Germany.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
France, Netherlands, United Kingdom
Cooperation Partners
Professor Dr. Arjen Boin; Dr. Andrea Mennicken; Professor Dr. Fabian Muniesa
