We assess the factors affecting national administrative rationalization in the context of the current worldwide movement for governance reforms. Focusing on indicators of corruption control, the rule of law, bureaucratic effectiveness, and investment openness, we conduct cross-national and longitudinal analyses for the period 1985-2002. First, we find a modest overall expansion of rationalization in countries worldwide, with the most substantial changes occurring in developing countries and previously communist countries. Change is mostly on the specific indicator of investment openness. Second, we find that national change tends to reflect links with global society - expanded trade, the penetration of scientific logics, and embeddedness in world organizational activity play prominent roles. We conclude, then, that the rationalization of national governance, as with a good many other dimensions of modernization, is not simply or principally a consequence of endogenous national development or social complexity. Rather, it directly reflects international trade, and institutional linkages with wider rationalizing movements in the current context of a neoliberal world polity.

This volume centers on the movement toward global legal standards, an increasingly recognized dimension of the quest to improve the rule of law. Although the drive to make law uniform across disparate political jurisdictions has a rich and imposing history, the contemporary enterprise to enact and enforce standard legal norms and procedures in fields as diverse as the law of companies, financial regulation, labor, constitutional dimensions of trade disputes resolution, environment and criminal procedure is clearly a growth industry. On the surface, the primary question posed by explaining this push toward standardization is why standard setting is emerging as a more prominent mechanism through which legal uniformity is pursued. There are numerous traditional and contemporary modes of extending the law across polities, among which the recent trend toward standardization commands particular attention. But just below the surface lie two related questions posed by the multiple movements toward legal homogenization.

The rule of law is a concept much in use to identify what is missing in many countries. It is a widespread and frequently repeated truism that the world in general, and the developing world in particular, needs "the rule of law." Most people do not have a very precise idea of what they mean when they invoke the rule of law. The reference is rich in historical and doctrinal connotations and therefore suggestive of meaning that is, however, hard to pin down.