The Measurer’s Dilemma

Abstract

Over the past decades, (mostly) private actors have been providing the public good of cross-national political data in a decentralized, uncoordinated, and unregulated fashion. They have been successful in generating an incessant supply of data. However, the success of current practices of data production has been masking severe structural limitations: the systematic undersupply of data and the systematic inefficiency of data generation. Both problems derive from disciplinary coordination failures (“measurer’s dilemmas”). On one hand, private data producers have been unable to coordinate the cross-national collection of two broad categories of data: political data produced by national governments (e.g., election results) and factual data that are not observable from the outside of national political systems but require access to domestic sources of information (e.g., protest events). On the other hand, private data producers have been unable to construct regulatory frameworks that would reduce persistent inefficiencies in data collection: data privatization, data opacity, and data incompatibility. To resolve these structural problems, the scholarly community will need to mobilize established collective actors, above all, their professional associations.