Recipients of PSC Small Grant Awards

In this research I show that ordinary people all around the world share similar views about the hierarchical ranking of nations. Far from a purely academic debate among policy makers and elites, ordinary people from places as diverse as rural Nepal, urban Cairo, and emerging-nations such as Bulgaria all share similar conceptions regarding the relative ordering of nations in a hierarchical structure. I posit that this ranking of countries represents national prestige scores (NPS) and that national prestige has significant application in the social sciences, as a nations prestige is predictive of immigration patterns, foreign direct investment, bilateral and multinational treaties and trade agreements, tourism traffic, fertility and educational goals, and a host of other factors that directly and indirectly affect the wealth, poverty and social status of nations. Using a number of different measures of national prestige, I show that the relative ordering of nations is robust to ranking methodologies. I suggest some of the most promising lines of research for explaining the causes of such broad cross-national agreement in national prestige scores and argue for their importance in sociological and developmental discourse.

Funding Source: PSC Initiatives