The Political Economy of Business-Government Connections

近年来，私营企业和政府之间的关系引起了学者、政策制定者和公众的极大兴趣，因为亲商机构被指责为当代许多问题的根源。虽然大多数关于商业影响力的研究都集中在潜在的商业-政治互动的相对狭窄的方面，如游说，竞选捐款，以及监管机构和行业之间的“旋转门”，但商业和政治之间的直接联系仍然是商业影响政治体系的一个未充分探索的机制。该项目收集关于公职人员与全球注册企业之间明确联系的数据。该数据集使研究人员能够描述政商联系的程度、跨行业和企业规模的联系类型、政商联系的潜在跨国性以及联系与政策结果的关系。这些数据还使研究人员能够评估关于商业权力的表达和影响的广泛假设。该数据集代表了对商业与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实现良好治理和民主问责制所必需的透明度。 首先，本研究评估了与企业和政府之间的国家和跨国联系相关的国家、行业和企业层面的因素。第二，研究措施的经济价值，这种连接到公司，通过比较的表现，政治上有联系的公司，无联系的公司。最后，该研究通过确定国家一级的企业与政府联系的经验如何影响政治机构的运作，公民对政府的看法以及宏观经济产出，将存在的政治联系与宏观经济和宏观政治结果联系起来。该项目利用来自Bureau货车Dijk的Orbis数据库的商业信息和来自Every Politician数据库、Keesing的World News Archive和政府网站的政客数据，开发了一个新的政客和企业之间明确联系的数据集。研究设计涉及这些数据的多方法定量分析，从各种公共数据库中提取适当的解释和控制变量，并使用在统计软件R中实施的复杂网络方法。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.