Leveraging Web Data to Monitor Changes in Corporate-Government Interlocks in India

ABSTRACT

Corporate executives who are linked to politicians or administrative officials, or family members of public officials with links to corporate organizations, are known to build an interlocking social network that becomes a power structure of highly influential entities. Such power structures often lead to an inequitable distribution of resources and manipulation of policies. A deeper look at this power structure and the constituent interlocks can provide users with valuable insights on these influential connections, and eventually, on the shaping of socio-economic outcomes by the interlocked political economy. In this paper, we describe the design of a platform to empirically monitor the degree of corporate-government interlock in India over time, by making use of publicly available data on the web. We find that the interlock has strengthened over the last decade, and we report the kind of interconnections and structural changes that have happened during this time. We also describe the design of an application to present news articles about an event or topic alongside the interconnection network of entities referred to in the news articles, to help users get a quick view of the main actors involved in the event. We find that this news search application is able to highlight several interconnections between prominent entities in an event, which had not been reported in the media. Overall, we find it relevant to build a technology platform which can help researchers and journalists to monitor the extent of interlocks between powerful stakeholders in the corporate and government spheres.

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Computers in other domains

• Information systems

  • Information systems applications

• Social and professional topics

  • Computing / technology policy