Autor/es
Descripción
ver mas
Colaborador
Lorenc Valcarce, Mario Federico
Solanas, Facundo
Spatial Coverage
Temporal Coverage
1996-2018
Idioma
spa
Extent
321 p.
Derechos
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 2.0 Genérica (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Formato
application/pdf
Identificador
Cobertura
ARG
1996-2018
Abstract
This thesis studies the production, circulation, and uses of indicators of governance and institutional quality, developed by international organizations since the end of the 20th century, in the context of the institutionalist turn of policy recommendations for emerging countries. We believe that these measurement instruments translate specialized knowledge and expert language from the economic and social sciences, but also express power relations between financial agencies and central countries, and those that occupy a peripheral place in the world system.
These indicators, as well as the data and concepts that embodied them, serve to evaluate the performance of societies and governments, and as a reference used by economic actors and central governments to guide their investment decisions and political support. In this context, forms of knowledge emerge, which order relationships, legitimize government actions, and distribute political power, in which indicators and rankings are a central part. Therefore, the main objective of this thesis is to analyze and characterize the relations of production, dissemination and use of the governance and institutional quality indicators for Argentina during the period from 1996 to 2018.
Specifically, we propose: to inquire about the theoretical frameworks involved in the construction of these indicators. Analyze the conceptual and methodological structure inherent to certain aggregated indicators of governance and institutional quality. Characterize and analyze the composition of these indicators according to their data provider sources, analyze the production, circulation and use networks of the indicators and the international organizations that calculate them. Examine how the results of these indicators are reproduced and disseminated in the press. We are also interested in the representations of the actors that intervene in their use, elaboration, and dissemination, and that legitimize the normative character of these constructions.
Our study focuses on the period between the mid-1990s and the present, and in particular, is interested in the way in which the indicators studied have an impact in the Argentine case, addressing the way in which these numerical representations shape politics, from underlying ideological mechanisms.
The research frame within the perspective of political sociology, taking elements from the studies of science and technology, scientific perspectivism, and the currents of the sociology of valuations and evaluations, and the sociology of quantification. A methodological strategy was used that triangulates elements of a quantitative, qualitative and reticular nature, whose main techniques articulate the analysis of social networks, interviews directed at key informants, documentary survey and journalistic notes. Specifically, we take a precise and limited universe of governance indicators in depth, the World Bank's recognized Worldwide Governance Indicators, for whose production philanthropic financing is essential. Likewise, we survey the news about governance and institutional quality of the newspaper La Nación, and the uses and representations that officials, journalists, academics and directors of Non-Governmental Organizations, International Credit Organizations and Development Agencies give to these measurements.
The main findings indicate that these indicators go beyond the simple visualization of the country's position in relation to global benchmarks of good governance, because they are endowed with political uses, either as a pressure tool, or as an engine for internal reforms of the country public management. The preferences of the sector that finances and produces these indicators uncritically turn into a normative ideological framework that demands the coparticipation and acceptance of the actors involved, as well as the sharing of conventions with semantic content (civic and market), and discursive justification strategies. Despite this, this process reproduces the same international mechanisms of power and hierarchical geopolitics positions.
Through veto power, inertia to maintain the status quo, credit eligibility, and discretion regarding data comparability, remove the veil of numerical representation´s apparent transparency. In this complex operation of coordinating agents, a key sector of the media (data journalism) contributes to the stylized dissemination of indicators, while maintaining formal and informal agreements with those who produce them, while certain organizations they define (and measure) what good governance and institutional quality are all about.
We hope through this research to contribute to the understanding of the deployment of ways of governing and evaluating where the boundaries that delimit the local and the international, the public and the private, the political and the social become blurred.
These indicators, as well as the data and concepts that embodied them, serve to evaluate the performance of societies and governments, and as a reference used by economic actors and central governments to guide their investment decisions and political support. In this context, forms of knowledge emerge, which order relationships, legitimize government actions, and distribute political power, in which indicators and rankings are a central part. Therefore, the main objective of this thesis is to analyze and characterize the relations of production, dissemination and use of the governance and institutional quality indicators for Argentina during the period from 1996 to 2018.
Specifically, we propose: to inquire about the theoretical frameworks involved in the construction of these indicators. Analyze the conceptual and methodological structure inherent to certain aggregated indicators of governance and institutional quality. Characterize and analyze the composition of these indicators according to their data provider sources, analyze the production, circulation and use networks of the indicators and the international organizations that calculate them. Examine how the results of these indicators are reproduced and disseminated in the press. We are also interested in the representations of the actors that intervene in their use, elaboration, and dissemination, and that legitimize the normative character of these constructions.
Our study focuses on the period between the mid-1990s and the present, and in particular, is interested in the way in which the indicators studied have an impact in the Argentine case, addressing the way in which these numerical representations shape politics, from underlying ideological mechanisms.
The research frame within the perspective of political sociology, taking elements from the studies of science and technology, scientific perspectivism, and the currents of the sociology of valuations and evaluations, and the sociology of quantification. A methodological strategy was used that triangulates elements of a quantitative, qualitative and reticular nature, whose main techniques articulate the analysis of social networks, interviews directed at key informants, documentary survey and journalistic notes. Specifically, we take a precise and limited universe of governance indicators in depth, the World Bank's recognized Worldwide Governance Indicators, for whose production philanthropic financing is essential. Likewise, we survey the news about governance and institutional quality of the newspaper La Nación, and the uses and representations that officials, journalists, academics and directors of Non-Governmental Organizations, International Credit Organizations and Development Agencies give to these measurements.
The main findings indicate that these indicators go beyond the simple visualization of the country's position in relation to global benchmarks of good governance, because they are endowed with political uses, either as a pressure tool, or as an engine for internal reforms of the country public management. The preferences of the sector that finances and produces these indicators uncritically turn into a normative ideological framework that demands the coparticipation and acceptance of the actors involved, as well as the sharing of conventions with semantic content (civic and market), and discursive justification strategies. Despite this, this process reproduces the same international mechanisms of power and hierarchical geopolitics positions.
Through veto power, inertia to maintain the status quo, credit eligibility, and discretion regarding data comparability, remove the veil of numerical representation´s apparent transparency. In this complex operation of coordinating agents, a key sector of the media (data journalism) contributes to the stylized dissemination of indicators, while maintaining formal and informal agreements with those who produce them, while certain organizations they define (and measure) what good governance and institutional quality are all about.
We hope through this research to contribute to the understanding of the deployment of ways of governing and evaluating where the boundaries that delimit the local and the international, the public and the private, the political and the social become blurred.
Título obtenido
Doctor de la Universidad de Buenos Aires en Ciencias Sociales
Institución otorgante
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales