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Rating politics : sovereign credit ratings and democratic choice in prosperous developed countries / Zsófia Barta and Alison Johnston.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Barta, Zsófia, author.
- Johnston, Alison, 1982- author.
- Series:
- Oxford scholarship online.
- Oxford scholarship online
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Credit ratings--Political aspects.
- Credit ratings.
- Policy sciences--Economic aspects.
- Policy sciences.
- Finance, Public.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (244 pages)
- Place of Publication:
- Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2023.
- Summary:
- This work explores how countries' political and policy choices affect the credit ratings that they receive. The authors use statistical analysis of ratings, interviews with sovereign rating analysts, and a close reading of official communications of rating agencies to show that ratings penalise centre-left governments and policies.
- Contents:
- Intro
- cover
- titlepage
- copyright
- dedication
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- 1 The puzzle: how do sovereign ratings react to politics and policy?
- Why sovereign ratings matter for prosperous developed countries
- Public consequences, private motives
- Minding their own business: why politics and policy matter for ratings
- The empirical material
- Contributions and the plan of the book
- 2 The business: why do ratings incorporate politics and policy?
- Down the rabbit hole: the counterintuitive world of credit ratings
- Third-party experts, not information brokers
- He who pays the piper does not call the tune: the audience does
- Not ``accurate,'' just workable: the overriding importance of rating stability and reliability
- Sovereign ratings: the Achilles heel of the rating business
- The role of sovereign ratings in the rating portfolio
- Modeling sovereign risk
- The bane of market reflexivity and the need for insurance
- How to insure sovereign ratings against crises? Enter policy and politics
- Policy as the transmission mechanism from shock to crisis: evidence from sovereign methodologies
- The technical is political: how ``duty of care'' breeds political and policy interference
- What role for ideas in a knowledge industry?
- Studying ratings in action: the empirical evidence
- 3 The score: how do ratings correlate with politics and policy?
- Hypotheses: how exactly might policy and politics matter for ratings?
- Monetary flexibility
- Expenditure flexibility
- Revenue flexibility
- Governance effectiveness
- Interrogating rating scores: the empirical strategy
- The dependent variable
- The explanatory variables: spending and taxation structures, political institutions, and partisanship
- The regression model.
- Penalties and rewards on politics and policy in ratings: the findings
- Spending and taxation
- Political and institutional variables
- The logic of insurance or neoliberal orthodoxy?
- Market mimicry? Comparing the approach to politics and policy in ratings and bond spreads
- The bond spread model
- Bond spread results
- Not aligned
- Reasonable suspicion
- 4 The frame: how do rating analysts rationalize their approach to politics and policy?
- Policy analysis done differently: the professional and epistemic affinities of rating analysts
- Revolving doors and the niche
- The science of credit
- The art of futurology
- ``The ethos of getting it right''
- Independent in every respect?
- Resilience and credibility: how analysts assess politics and policy
- Shrouded in complexity
- Points of agreement: debt-bearing capacity and resilience
- Lost in contextualization
- Subjective and suggestible
- The art of squaring circles
- Appendix: Interview methods
- Sample frame
- Response rate and type
- Format and length, recording method, and transcripts
- 5 The narrative: how rating reports explain specific rating decisions in Denmark, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom
- Methodological considerations
- Policy flexibility in action: how reports discuss specific policy features
- Entitlements
- Social services
- Taxation
- The rules and the exceptions
- Decisiveness, mainstream convergence, and consensus: politics in rating reports
- Checks and balances
- Partisanship
- Commitment is the name of the game
- Political-economic models and the holy grail of reform
- In search of a leitmotif
- Why is reform so important?
- Reform as a yardstick
- The pieces fall into place
- 6 The upshot: ratings as a neglected force in global governance
- Does it work?
- Does it have to be this way?.
- Sovereign ratings as an enduring force in global governance
- Bibliography
- Index.
- Notes:
- Also issued in print: 2023.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed on May 22, 2023).
- Other Format:
- Print version: Barta, Zsófia Rating Politics
- ISBN:
- 0-19-198856-1
- 0-19-887818-4
- 0-19-887819-2
- OCLC:
- 1376195736
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