Samenvatting

This article points out some of the pitfalls and ambiguities involved in quantified cross-national policy comparisons by looking at the construction and use of standardized indicators in the field of pension policy. The empirical analysis looks at three cases where the OESO and EU use standardized pension indicators to score and rank the performance of national pension systems. The cases illustrate some of the problems associated with scoring and ranking the outcomes of unique and complex pension systems by means of internationally standardized indicators. Our results show that internationally standardised indicators for pension systems are not neutral in the sense that they favor countries with certain institutional pension policy mixes over others. When particular institutional characteristics are treated differently under the same metric, systematically distorted conclusions about the performance of national pension systems may, and likely do, result. Consequently, these observed biases hinder reliable cross-national comparison that is based on these indicators. The article concludes with some recommendations on the construction and use of international indicators in the field of pension policy. It also discusses where research on the process of commensuration – transforming qualities into quantities − in a comparative context should go from here.