Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds

TLDR

A proliferation of accountability and transparency measures has emerged recently. The article uses law school rankings to argue that reactivity—the behavioral change induced by evaluation—provides a lens to understand how such measures affect outcomes. The authors propose a framework that identifies self‑fulfilling prophecy and commensuration as mechanisms of reactivity and distinguishes their effect patterns. The approach shows that public measures alter expectations and permeate institutions, underscoring the need for systematic study of their impact.

Abstract

Recently, there has been a proliferation of measures responding to demands for accountability and transparency. Using the example of media rankings of law schools, this article argues that the methodological concept of reactivity—the idea that people change their behavior in reaction to being evaluated, observed, or measured—offers a useful lens for disclosing how these measures effect change. A framework is proposed for investigating the consequences, both intended and unintended, of public measures. The article first identifies two mechanisms, self‐fulfilling prophecy and commensuration, that induce reactivity and then distinguishes patterns of effects produced by reactivity. This approach demonstrates how these increasingly fateful public measures change expectations and permeate institutions, suggesting why it is important for scholars to investigate the impact of these measures more systematically.