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AbstractAs noted by other contributions to this special issue, an American perspective shapes many leading quantitative datasets used by international relations scholars. This tendency can lead to biased inferences, but it can also enhance scholarly accuracy under certain conditions. Precisely because some datasets reflect national perspectives, they are appropriate to use when seeking to test theories in which the actors of interest subscribe to the same national perspective. This argument is illustrated with the case of US democracy assistance. Using an appropriate measure of democracy reveals that—contrary to some claims in the literature—US policy-makers allocate democracy assistance in ways that reflect their perceptions of countries' regime types, giving less democracy assistance to countries that they perceive as more democratic.

TheFreedom in the World(FITW) ratings of countries' freedom, created by Freedom House in 1972, are widely used by many U.S. audiences, including journalists, policymakers, and scholars. Why and how did these ratings acquire private authority in the United States? Furthermore, why and to what extent have they retained private authority over time and across different audiences? Contrary to previous research on private authority, which emphasizes the role of raters' expertise and independence, I advance an argument that emphasizes the role of ideological affinity between raters and users. Specifically, I argue that ratings are more likely to have authority among actors that share raters' ideas about concept definition and coding. I also argue that ratings are more likely to have authority among weak actors that depend on powerful other users of the ratings. Diverse evidence and methods—including data on the ratings' usage, an internal archive of Freedom House records, interviews with key informants, and a statistical analysis of bias—support the argument.