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Global performance indicators (GPIs), such as ratings and rankings, permeate nearly every type of human activity, internationally and nationally, across public and private spheres. While some indicators aim to attract media readership or brand the creator's organization, others increasingly seek to influence political practices and policies. The Power of Global Performance Indicators goes beyond the basic questions of methodological validity explored by others to launch a fresh debate about power in the modern age, exploring the ultimate questions concerning real-world consequences of GPIs, both intended and unintended. From business regulation to terrorism, education to foreign aid, Kelley and Simmons demonstrate how GPIs provoke bureaucracies, shape policy agendas, and influence outputs through their influence of third parties such as donors and market actors and, potentially, even broader global authority structures.

"The seeds of this volume were planted as early as 2011 when we were working on a project about the United States efforts to combat trafficking in persons. That project was focused on the rating system by the US Department of State, which assesses government efforts to combat human trafficking. We wondered, do that "tier" system had any influence on countries' propensity to criminalize human trafficking. Somewhere halfway through the project, in the fall of 2011, we were skyping across the Atlantic in a series of intense revision efforts, when we began to realize that we might be on to something larger than this specific example and that there was something about of the process of rating that went beyond information gathering; it seemed to constitute social pressure, maybe even an effort at governance. While we had worked before on the effects of monitoring and global norms on state behavior and studied causal mechanisms from reputational concerns to domestic mobilization around global norms, this phenomenon seemed to bring together many of these past insights into a unique combination of causal mechanisms. Soon thereafter we were both grateful for the opportunity to attend a conference at NYU in 2014 organized by Sally Merry and Benedict Kingsbury on the construction of performance indices. The more we started to think about it, the more we were intrigued about the phenomenon of rating and rankings"--