The Political Economy of Business-Government Connections

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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.