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Jan-Philipp Horstmann
Former Member
Title
Dr.
Last Name
Horstmann
First name
Jan-Philipp
Email
jan.horstmann@unisg.ch
Phone
+41 71 224 7540
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Item type:Publication, Halbamtliche Wissenschaft - Internationale Statistikkongresse und preussische Professorenbürokraten im 19. JahrhundertDue to the global rise of statistics to becoming one of the most important resources of political rhetoric and administrative decision-making, the possibility of distortion of statistical data by nation-states is increasing at the same time. The structural causes of this controversy date back to the 19th century. The central aspect of this dissertation is the presentation of the institutional interconnection of science and politics in the field of government statistics. More precisely, the central question to be answered is how discourses of ideas and methods negotiated at the international level found their way into national administrative structures. While doing so, the study focuses on statistical experts who were responsible not only for the negotiation but also for the administrative implementation of international statistics. As a consequence of the founding of the International Statistical Congress (1853-1878) and, from 1885, the International Statistical Institute, a cross-border exchange of methods and data was institutionalised for the first time with the aim of facilitating the comparability of statistical surveys. In the analysis of the semi-official science congresses it becomes clear that statistical science had only limited autonomy. As a result of their institutional anchoring at the boundary between state power politics and scientific research, a field of tension arose between particularist nationalism and universalist internationalism. The participating experts were mostly faced with the challenge of playing a dual role as scientists and civil servants, as the case study of the so-called professor bureaucrats in Prussia and the German Reich shows. While on the one hand administrative statisticians advanced to become competitive actors in foreign relations, the negotiation results of experts exchange on the other hand promoted an international unification of official statistics. This has demonstrably set nation-state reform processes in motion. The internationalization of official statistics found its institutional expression, for example, in the establishment of a central statistical commission as a direct response to Congress decisions, but also in the introduction of comparable classifications, survey and measurement methods, and economic indicators. With the help of a methodological approach to institutional change based on the history of ideas as well as historical source documents from the Secret State Archives of Prussian Cultural Heritage, the precarious formation conditions and limitations of international statistics to be characterized as semi-official science are presented.Type:doctoral thesis