300459 The Quantification of World Politics (S) (SoSe 2022)

Numbers are a pervasive feature of world politics. Many political issues are represented in quantitative terms, including the world economy, global development, and climate change. The quantification of world politics has a long history, but has gained new momentum in the last decades which witnessed the proliferation of rankings of the performance of states in various policy fields as well as the advent of big data. The seminar aims to provide an overview of these trends and to equip the participants with tools for analysing the quantification of world politics. It is structured into three parts: The first part discusses theoretical perspectives on the proliferation and use of numbers in world politics. The second part compares the quantification processes that shape five policy fields: security, economy, development, climate and health. The third part explores the advent of big data and its impact on world politics.