as well as the participants of the NPS seminar in Edinburgh in 2019 and the 2020 American Political Science Association meeting.We have no conflicts of interest to disclose. This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as

Goodhart's Law, originally inspired by money-supply indicators, predicts high-consequence administrative numbers tend to be gamed out of meaningfulness. This paper argues that, in addition to the well documented manipulation of aggregate input numbers at the top-levels of decision making and performance indicators used for output control at the lower level, mesolevel gaming happens also on the input side of public expenditure planning and control. A key mechanism through which it operates is creative categorization in the classification of units of spending. Based on a UK study, we explore three questions: can we find evidence for the existence of gaming in public expenditure control, how does the creative categorization work and how material or consequential is it? Using case studies of "protected" spending, public-private partnerships and accounting changes, we show that gaming understood as creative categorization is readily observable in UK public expenditure control and Goodhart's Law effects can indeed be material or consequential, both in scale and in their implications for government accountability. We conclude that creating new spending categories to control public expenditure and limit gaming is a two-edged sword, since it itself creates new opportunities for gaming.

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How does access to foreign or independent media affect the operation of a state security apparatus? This article answers this question concentrating on two characteristics of the informant network of the East German Stasi: the number of informants and their “price.” Exposure to West German TV (WGTV) had the potential to decrease the supply of informants and increase the demand for them, pushing up the value of the payments the informants received, but leaving their quantity theoretically ambiguous. I verify this reasoning using a rare original data set of Stasi informants. Results show that informants were given approximately 70 East German marks worth of rewards more per year in the areas that had access to WGTV, as compared with areas with no reception—ironically an amount roughly equivalent to the cost of an annual East German TV subscription. These findings demonstrate how an authoritarian state can counteract the potentially destabilizing effect of foreign media.

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