The Political Economy of Business-Government Connections

私营企业与政府之间的关系近年来引起了学者、政策制定者和公众的极大兴趣，因为亲商机构被指责为许多当代问题的罪魁祸首。虽然大多数关于商业影响力的研究都集中在潜在的商业与政治互动的相对狭窄的方面，如游说、竞选捐款以及监管机构与行业之间的“旋转门”，但商业与政治之间的直接联系仍然是商业影响政治体系的一个未被充分探索的机制。该项目收集有关全球政府官员与注册企业之间明确联系的数据。该数据集允许研究人员描述政治-商业联系的程度、跨行业和公司规模的联系类型、商业-政治联系的潜在跨国以及这种联系与政策结果的关系。这些数据还允许研究人员评估关于商业权力的表达和含义的广泛假设。该数据集代表了对商业-政治关系的先前研究的重大进展，这些数据的公开发布有助于提高良好治理和民主问责制所必需的透明度。这个研究项目有三个主要目标。首先，该研究评估了国家、行业和公司层面的因素，这些因素与企业与政府之间的国家和跨国联系有关。其次，通过比较有政治关系的企业与没有政治关系的企业的绩效，研究衡量了这种关系对企业的经济价值。最后，该研究通过确定国家层面的企业-政府关系经验如何影响政治机构的运作、公民对政府的看法和宏观经济产出，将政治关系的存在与宏观经济和宏观政治结果联系起来。该项目利用来自Bureau van Dijk的Orbis数据库的商业信息，以及来自Every Politician数据库、Keesing 's World News Archive和政府网站的政治家数据，开发了一个新的政治家和企业之间明确联系的数据集。研究设计涉及对这些数据的多方法定量分析，从各种公共数据库中获取适当的解释和控制变量，并使用统计软件r中实施的复杂网络方法。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The relationship between private industry and governments has attracted substantial interest from scholars, policymakers, and the general public in recent years as pro-business institutions have been blamed for a host of contemporary issues. While most studies of business influence focus on relatively narrow aspects of potential business-politics interaction such as lobbying, campaign contributions, and the “revolving door” between regulators and industry, direct connections between business and politics remains an underexplored mechanism for business influence in political systems. This project collects data on the explicit links between public officials and registered businesses globally. The dataset allows researchers to describe the extent of the political-business linkages, the types of connections across industries and firm size, the potential transnationality of business-politics ties, and the relationship of connections to policy outcomes. These data also allow researchers to evaluate a wide range of hypotheses about expressions of and implications of business power. The dataset represents a major advance on prior research on business-politics connections, and the public release of these data contributes to the type of transparency that is necessary for good governance and democratic accountability.There are three primary objectives of this research program. First, the research assesses the country-, industry-, and firm-level factors associated with national and transnational connections between business and government. Second, the research measures the economic value of such connections to firms, by comparing the performance of politically-connected firms to unconnected firms. Finally, the research links what political connections exist to macroeconomic and macropolitical outcomes by determining how country-level experiences with business-government connections affect the functioning of political institutions, citizens’ perceptions about their governments, and macroeconomic outputs. The project develops a new dataset of the explicit links between politicians and businesses using business information from the Orbis database of Bureau van Dijk and data on politicians from the Every Politician database, the Keesing’s World News Archive, and government websites. The research design involves a multi-method quantitative analysis of these data, with appropriate explanatory and control variables taken from a variety of public databases and using complex network methodologies implemented in the statistical software R.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.