Government statistical agencies and the politics of credibility
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Author | Philip Rocco |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12786 |
BOOK REVIEW
Government statistical agencies and the politics
of credibility
Are official statistics an appropriate subject of study for political scientists? A casual look at the subject yields a
resounding yes. As Andreas Georgiou—the head of the independent Greek statistical agency Elstat who was later
sentenced to 2 years probation for faking national fiscal data—put it: “statistics is a combat sport.”
Yet, scandal aside, the production of official statistics has a way of rendering its subtle politics more impervious
to study. After all, statisticians and economists in the civil service are primarily responsible for keeping national statis-
tical systems humming. They tend not to think of themselves, or their work, as having a politics to it. And the tables
and figures they produce have a way of erasing their own political and social histories. Official statistics are infra-
structure precisely because they are taken for granted. They can be taken for granted because the political struggles
that define them rarely play out at the mass level, and are sometimes—but not always—encoded in technical con-
flicts. Political scientists, for whom official statistics are typically no more than data to be mined, may find themselves
in terra incognita here.
The same cannot be said for Cosmo Howard. His book, Government Statistical Agencies and the Politics of Credi-
bility, is thoroughly researched, challenging, and brimming with useful insights on how political institutions, culture,
and above all the quest for credibility, alter the allocation of statistical authority in liberal democracies. The project is
an ambitious one, investigating official statistics in five countries (Australia, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom,
and the United States) and drawing on 85 interviews with top officials. The empirical focus is also capacious. Unlike
other studies, Howard does not limit his analysis to one sort of official statistics or another—say, population counts
or national income statistics. Instead, the book aims to examine how elected governments steer the production of
the whole range of official statistics. Why, Howard asks, might official statistics in one country be more subject to
political control while others are more insulated from politics?
The study is an exploratory one, and this makes sense. Until fairly recently, there have been few efforts to
explicitly theorize the production of official statistics. The research that followed from William Alonso and Paul
Starr's pioneering edited volume, The Politics of Numbers (1987), can best be described as belonging to an empirical
genre rather than a coherent research literature. Still, Howard offers a theoretical framework to bound his analysis;
drawing on Erving Goffman's work on dramaturgy, he argues that both elected politicians and official statisticians
face “performative credibility imperatives”which shape how national statistical authorities are constructed. Against
a backdrop of distrust, elected officials draw on “neutral”official numbers to legitimate their decisions. At the same
time, they have incentives to preempt or otherwise subvert the production of official statistics that clash with their
most important policy imperatives. Statisticians also seek credibility, and employ a variety of means to accomplish it,
ranging from efforts to create an impression of technical competence to the production of policy-relevant reports.
Relevance and technical competence, unsurprisingly, often find themselves at loggerheads.
Each country's unique administrative tradition, in Howard's view, affects how politicians and statisticians per-
form credibility, and hence the allocation of statistical authority. Canada's central statistical agency, Statistics
Canada, exists as a ministerial department rather than an independent agency. Nevertheless, the agency's chief has
Cambridge University Press, 2021. 200 pp. $99.99. ISBN: 9781108491228
Received: 30 August 2021 Accepted: 15 September 2021
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12786
448 © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Public Admin. 2022;100:448–450.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm
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