Introducing the Global Corruption Observatory and its Large-Scale Datasets
In the recent years, political institutions across the world have experienced a “transparency rush” that has led to the digitization and opening of large and diversified deposits of data, including parliamentary data on debates, bills, laws, votes, and consultations. Simultaneously, the rise of data science and data analytics in public policy research created tools for analysing such troves of micro-level data. Jointly, these developments offer a crucial tool for addressing hard-to-solve problems around the integrity and impartiality of parliamentary processes and outputs.
This presentation will introduce the new, large-scale legislative dataset soon-to-be-published by the OSUN-funded Global Corruption Observatory and it will also outline its conceptual underpinning. In this context, we define and measure legislative favouritism understood as laws (or some aspects of them) that disproportionally advantage specific interests over others in a given economic sector, as reflected in legislative process and outputs. We will showcase the data collected and offer insights on how favouritism in lawmaking can be proxied directly from administrative data. Our measurement approach builds on high-profile policy developments such as the OECD’s recently revamped Integrity Indicators and the World Banks newest initiative measuring legislative quality.
Instead of conclusions, we will invite participants to share their ideas and interests as to what exciting new research can be done with the data and which new avenues for policy analysis can be opened up.