Transparency’s Promise: The State of Open Data against Corruption

• In Event: Digital Practices in Democratic Innovations

Abstract

Part of the promise of big data has been opening up data held by governments, especially data that can help identify, prevent, and prosecute corruption. This has meant publishing previously secret datasets, and, increasingly, publishing that data in open data formats. The government's ability to use this data – in concert with the public – is essential. Auditors must be able to access and use fiscal data, contracting data, and data to identify conflicts of interest and irregularities. Electoral management boards must be able to evaluate conflicts of interest, political finance data, and asset disclosures. Even more, this has meant supporting users – including internal government users, as well as external users such as civil society organizations, journalists, and interested citizens – to reuse government data as a public good.

Numerous studies and datasets have taken stock of de jure rules on data disclosure around political corruption. Still others take into account “environmental” or perception-based indicators around the existence of corruption.

This study is novel in that it surveys the actual existence of that data on government websites in 68 countries. In this sense, it contributes to a broader body of knowledge about what governments are actually doing, in terms of transparency, to combat corruption.

Opening data against political corruption consists of publishing certain core datasets that anti-corruption experts have come to see as necessary in order to understand trade in influence and money in politics. The study covers nine areas closely related to political corruption: asset disclosure, political finance, company beneficial ownership, land ownership and tenure, public procurement, lobbying, right to information law performance, rulemaking, interoperability. The authors believe that this is the largest database on officials’ assets, lobbying disclosure, and availability of public procurement data.

The study goes beyond identifying whether data is merely available to also identifying other elements of quality. These include strength of legal framework for collection and publication, presence of high-value elements (as identified by experts in each respective field), and issues of usability.

The data has been collected by researchers across 108 different countries, and reviewed by governments. The dataset, findings, and visualization tools are available at https://www.opengovpartnership.org/broken-links/

Authors

• Joseph M Foti, Open Government Partnership

• Kristen Rose, Open Government Partnership