Quantification, Administrative Capacity and Democracy

数字越来越多地支配着公共服务。决策活动和行政控制越来越多地围绕成本效益分析、社会和财政回报估计、业绩和风险的衡量、基准、量化的影响评估、评级和排名等计算，所有这些都以数字表示的形式提供信息。通过量化，公共服务经历了从“规则政府”到“数字治理”的根本转变，这不仅对我们理解公共服务本身的性质，而且对关于公民身份和民主的性质的更广泛的辩论也有根本的影响。该项目仔细研究了三个政策部门(卫生/医院、高等教育/大学、刑事司法/监狱)和四个国家(法国、德国、荷兰、英国)的量化、行政能力和民主之间的关系。它提供了一项跨国家和跨部门的研究，研究管理主义的思想和量化工具是如何被采用的，以及它们是如何重要的。更具体地说，它审查(1)量化如何跨越部门和国家；(2)量化与行政能力之间的关系；(3)量化如何重新定义公共服务与自由民主对公共福利的理解、公民意识、公平、问责和合法性之间的关系。

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 andadministrative 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.