Power in Numbers: A Call for Analytical Generosity toward New Political Strategies

This paper is a methodological and epistemological reflection on the power of numbers to contribute to the debate over the potential and limitations of market politics as a regulatory force in the global economy. Informal regulatory networks, including transnational corporate campaigns, form a new sphere of politics which leap-frogs the state and targets corporations directly concerning their social and environmental impacts. I describe my statistical analysis of corporate campaigns targeting US multinationals to argue in favor of analytical generosity when evaluating these new political forms. I argue that a reflexive and critical quantification can provide new insights into stakeholder power and contemporary political processes.