Description:

Please join this Joint Comparative and International Relations Graduate Workshop as they host Andrés Schelp with discussant Andrew Saab, two graduate students in Northwestern's Political Science Department.

Abstract: After the 1990s, Western states fostered the expansion and global diffusion of Global Performance Indicators (GPIs). These indicators evaluate the accordance of countries' institutions and policies to templates and policy scripts following dominant international norms, which tend to be associated with the Liberal International Order. Among them, democratic GPIs have become one prominent way to assess the state of democracy globally. While some studies argue that democratic governance and norms are eroding, evidence about their relevance and contestation at the international level is still limited. By examining the production of global democratic standards that qualify state regime types and target states' behavior, I aim to provide inferences about countries' adherence to liberal democracy. While previous research (Giannone, 2010; Gunitsky, 2015: Bush, 2017; but also see Roberts and Tellez, 2020) mostly centered on the institutions that make these assessments, my work will focus on the two key groups of states that democratic GPIs target: states 'performing' according to Western democratic templates, who value democratic traits and should have a stake in shaming and pressuring states with declining democratic scores; and 'underperforming' states, who tend to be more closely under the scrutiny of these indicators, as they might monitor and 'degrade' the democratic qualifications of their regimes. In this piece, I present my prospectus project's rationale, theory, and research design (in progress), centered on studying states' reactions to Freedom House Freedom in the World rankings.