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 Walter Bartl &#38;  Christian Papilloud  (2020)Statistical Journal of the IAOS. vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 375-399Abstract. It is commonly claimed that the use of numbers and indicators in society is on the rise. Yet, it is still unclear why numbers are used in some social fields but not in others. This paper investigates the specific use of indicators in the policy field of federal spatial planning in Germany. While the use of indicators is very common in this area, the guiding idea of equivalent living conditions has not been operationalized with an agreed on set of indicators nor do particular policy instruments targeting ‘unequivalent’ living conditions exist. Why is this the case? Drawing on literature about the use of scientific knowledge in politics as well as on social studies of quantification processes, we argue that regular monitoring of regional disparities has increased the political salience of the idea of equivalent living conditions. At the same time, a more systematic formalization of this idea has been hampered, firstly, by the entangled competencies of German federalism and secondly, by the ambiguous idea of equivalent living conditions which has faced competition by the more narrowly defined concept of regional economic development and the related GDP indicator.Extract. “The third type of argument, pointing to a complementary relationship between indicators and their societal environment, can be found, to a certain extent, in most studies on the history of statistics and indicators. In our view, it has been presented most explicitly by Alain Desrosières, who developed a typology of indicators and the historical periods in which they were predominantly used [59]. His more general argument is that the legitimacy of indicators depends on complementary normative ideas as well as the political language of a particular historical period [41]. A similar concept of co-emergence of calculative practices and a corresponding legitimizing vocabulary is used in the social studies of accounting [63]. Complementary relationships between indicators and their interpretation can emerge quasi-naturally, but they can also be purposefully created by investments in forms [64]. In such an investment process, the effort required for categorization and association can be reduced if existing forms of high generalization can be built upon.” (p. 4)Link to the International Association for Official Statistics 