The incommensurables: the arduous art of making a regulatory indicator

ABSTRACT

The stress test of the European Central Bank has become one of the primary regulatory tools for the European banking system. In order to make such a regulatory indicator, different national banks need to be commensurated. They need to be made comparable according to a common metric. Despite a substantive literature, little empirical work has been done to further our understanding of the social and political processes through which these indicators are made. We use Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to enrich the existing literature with an in-depth account of how commensuration is negotiated. We find that despite a preference for commensuration, regulators allow ‘incommensurable’ categories to exist due to largely unrecognized regulatory benefits.

KEYWORDS:

• Regulatory indicators
• commensuration
• capture
• gaming
• Actor-Network Theory (ANT)
• transnational knowledge controversies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. According to respondents, Daniele Nouy, the chair of the Supervisory Board at the ECB, made this statement while announcing the stress test.

2. And when you hear experts talking about this it often seems as if there is as much at stake.

3. Two respondents at the ECB did not want our conversation to be recorded, but we were allowed to take notes, which we subjected to the same coding as the transcribed interviews.

4. For more on the SSM see the website of the ECB: https://www.bankingsupervision.europa.eu/about/thessm/html/index.en.html.

5. To be sure, the ECB is quite strict when it comes to granting exceptions. In discussions the ECB does often still have the upper hand and can force banks to comply with the results they projected.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [11X9818N].

Notes on contributors

Shirley Kempeneer

Shirley Kempeneer (corresponding author) is a PhD fellow at the University of Antwerp. She is affiliated to the Department of Political Sciences in the Research Group Politics & Public Governance. Her dissertation deals with the regulatory implications of knowledge production through indicators.

Wouter Van Dooren

Wouter van Dooren is a Professor of Public Administration at the University of Antwerp and the Antwerp Management School. He is affiliated to the Department of Political Sciences in the Research Group Politics & Public Governance. His main research interests are performance measurement and management in the public sector, accountability, participation, and citizen state interactions.