The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has been interested in the independent effect of prominent ranking exercises for some time now. Scholarship by Judith Kelley, Beth Simmons and other researchers demonstrates that states care a surprising amount about how they are ranked and rated by, say, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on education, the U.N. Development Program on human development, Transparency International on corruption, and so forth. Nor is this interest limited to national governments, as anyone familiar with how universities treat the U.S. News and World Report rankings on higher education can tell you.