Rating Politics
Sovereign Credit Ratings and Democratic Choice in Prosperous Developed Countries
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 27 April 2023
- ISBN 9780198878179
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages224 pages
- Size 240x162x15 mm
- Weight 472 g
- Language English 457
Categories
Short description:
This book 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 penalize center-left governments and policies.
MoreLong description:
How do countries' political and policy choices affect the credit ratings they receive? Sovereign ratings influence countries' cost of funding, and observers have long worried that rating agencies - these unelected, unappointed, unaccountable, for-profit organizations - can interfere with democratic sovereignty if they assign lower ratings to certain political and policy choices. The questions of whether, how, and why ratings react to policy and politics, however, remain unexplored. Rating Politics opens the black box of sovereign ratings to uncover the logic that drives rating responses to political and policy factors. Relying on statistical analysis of rating scores, interviews with sovereign rating analysts, and a close reading of the official communications of rating agencies about their decisions, Zsófia Barta and Alison Johnston show that ratings penalize center-left governments and many (though not all) policies associated with the center-left agenda. The motivation for such penalties is not rooted in assumptions about how those political and policy features affect growth and debt servicing capacity. Instead, ratings are lower in the presence of those features because they are expected to make a country more vulnerable to market panics whenever the economy is hit by unforeseen shocks, as they signal insufficient willingness and/or ability to engage in determined austerity for the sake of reassuring markets. Since market panics and the resulting "sudden stops" of funding lead to humiliating collapses of ratings, rating agencies attempt to insure themselves against "rating failures" by pre-emptively assigning lower ratings to countries with the "wrong" political and policy mix.
Zsofia Barta and Alison Johnston have written the best book to date on the political economy of sovereign credit ratings. In Rating Politics, Barta and Johnston demonstrate that the often unintuitive logic of how rating agencies assess the credit worthiness of sovereigns creates constraints on policies, despite the fact that the agencies do not assess governments directly through lenses of either politics of policies. The role of rating agencies in sovereign credit markets is influential and at the same time poorly understood. Employing every possible methodological tool to make sense of the practices and effects of rating agencies, Barta and Johnston have made a significant, enduring contribution to our understanding of how the world economy functions.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
List of figures
Abbreviations
The puzzle: How do sovereign ratings react to politics and policy?
The business: Why do ratings incorporate politics and policy?
The score: How do rating correlate with politics and policy?
The frame: How do rating analysts rationalize their approach to politics and policy?
The narrative: How rating reports explain specific rating decisions in Denmark, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom
The upshot: Ratings as a neglected force in global governance
Bibliography
Index
