Achieving an Open Cooperation Infrastructure for the Analysis of Economic Elites Across the World

Kevin L Young

Funding Area: Community governance / Gobernanza comunitaria

Problem Statement: Currently, researchers studying the economic elite are widely dispersed and fragmented, across both different disciplines and across different global geographies. In particular, researchers from the Global South and the Global North rarely communicate, let alone collaborate with one another. This project aims to change that, by facilitating research cooperation and data sharing through the facilitative role of ‘data governance coordinators’, meeting sequences and the sharing of new data as a common pool resource for researchers. This fragmentation of researchers on economic elites is significant because the dramatic escalation of within-country inequality that the world is currently experiencing is driven not simply by a downward pressure on real wages and public goods, but by a massification of economic rewards at the very top. Moreover, economic assets are being concentrated not only nationally but globally, even as elite systems are primarily nationally-based. Our world is increasingly a world driven by and for elites and elite reproduction. If social science is to make sense of this process, we need to conduct focused study on elites, and economic elites in particular. While political elites are frequently in the media spotlight, are well-known to the public, and are extensively studied by social scientists, this is not true of economic elites. While the study of income and wealth inequality has witnessed a resurgence and maturation, the study of economic elites has not.

Proposed Activities: We seek funding to build and strengthen the capacity for researchers across the Global South and Global North to communicate and coordinate data sharing activities in a systematic fashion. Primarily this would take the form of a pair of ‘data governance coordinators’, one based in the Global South and another in the Global North, to facilitate meetings and data sharing arrangements, across a growing group of researchers. The two ‘data governance coordinators’ would be responsible for collecting names of researchers on economic elites, through surveys of existing scientific literature (including across languages) and also, importantly, across the contacts within the group, as it grows. The data governance coordinators would then proceed in three steps, to build communication, coordinate meetings, and generate routines of data standardization. This proceeds in three steps. First, a ‘global coordinator’ will arrange smaller bilateral online meetings across researchers from pairings of countries. For example, researchers from Colombia will meet the researchers from Canada; the researchers from India will meet the researchers from Brazil. The purpose is not to read and discuss working papers. The purpose is to build trust and facilitate communication. What does the economic elite look in ‘your’ country, what are the challenges to measuring ‘x-attribute’ within your country, etc. These are designed to be open, dialogical meetings. Second, the ‘data governance coordinators’ will arrange a larger set of ‘multilateral’ online meetings, involving researchers from several countries at once. These meetings will be more limited in number from each country but will involve researchers from several different countries at once. The purpose of these meetings will be to exchange viewpoints and experiences on the collection of economic elite data. Third, the data governance coordinators would meet, once in a location in the Global South (location to be determined and another time in a location in the Global North (location to be determined), in order to facilitate coordination and work out common pool resource challenges. Instead of meeting in their respective home countries, they will meet in locations where other researchers are clustered close by, or at conferences that bring researchers together in the region, in order to make the most of the meetings. The challenge of coordination could be surmounted not only through a centralized coordinator, but through a shared, open data repository. Common pool resources need to be governed to be shared effectively. Collecting and storing data about elite populations is not merely a technical problem, but a coordinative one. While the data that researchers collect is typically from publicly available sources, a principle concern is the different data storing and sharing arrangements across different national and regional jurisdictions. The coordinator would research the appropriate storage facilities.

Openness: This project seeks to make data open in two significant ways. First, it seeks to make data generated by researchers in different national sites of the Global North and the Global South available to one another as a shared, common pool resource. Researchers can openly share data with one another, under the guise that all are contributing and have equal access but also equal recognition in exchange for their labour and effort. This is what we call the ‘takeoff stage’ of data collection. Second, after the project takes off, we seek to make data generated through this process available to the entire world, through a publicly accessible data repository such as the Harvard Dataverse. To facilitate accountability and shared and transparent governance, hypotheses and study designs can also be made publicly available through AsPredicted.org, or other open, searchable ‘pre-registration’ research design repositories. Coding scripts developed through the project, will be developed in the ‘R’ statistical environment and will be thus accessible to anyone with a computer, so that software licenses are not a barrier to future researchers. Importantly, the project aims to develop and spread not only actual data on economic elites, but a set of standardized routines for collecting that data. This not only facilitates openness and transparency in its own right, but also promotes replicability of our study design to researchers in country contexts that have not become connected to our group.

Challenges: Selecting data governance coordinators will not be a major challenge, and the position might even be rotated over time, so long as one coordinator is from the Global South and one is from the Global North. One of the central issues the project faces is the mosaic of data storage and data protection regulations faced by researchers, both in Universities and in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that focus on studying elites. This is exacerbated by the existence of different data protection regimes that exist across different country (and in the case of the EU, regional) requirements. It is for this reason that we have budgeted for advisory fees for consultants, to offer expert guidance on how to best navigate this terrain while still maximizing the openness of the project infrastructure and its aims. Communicating across languages is also an anticipated challenge, although we also anticipate that English is widely spoken by at least a few researchers within each country team. Translation services are budgeted primarily to facilitate reaching out to new researchers and for making researchers around the world aware of the established data and the data collection routines established. This is especially important for generating a replicable set of data collection routines that students and junior researchers across the Global South can utilize.

Neglectedness: There exists an impressive data infrastructure to study economic inequality – primarily due to the advent of the World Inequality Dataset (WID). Our project aims to build a new infrastructure that facilitates data sharing across researchers who do focused, scientific work on economic elites. No such data sharing infrastructure currently exists, and we are not aware of funding opportunities that facilitate the needed commitment to a shared open data infrastructure such as this. The neglect of common pool resources for research on economic elites is a serious issue given the importance of the subject matter, and how little is known about economic elites. While political elites are frequently in the media spotlight, are well-known to the public, and are extensively studied by social scientists, this is not true of economic elites. While the study of income and wealth inequality has witnessed a resurgence and a maturation over the last decade, the study of economic elites has not. A large portion of economic inequality is driven by the concentration of income and wealth into the hands of very few individuals, and the command over organizations that organize the economy are concentrated in the hands of very few individuals as well. The economic elite are neither elected nor widely known (outside of a few key governing posts and famous billionaires), and yet they are massively important for how the economy and society at large is organized.

Success: We would measure success of the project through several different indicators. The entire purpose of this project is to generate greater collaborative data sharing arrangements, and so this would be the main indicator of success for us. Joint scientific publications across country teams involved would be a related and very tangible that the project was working successfully. Another indicator of success would be if researchers begin to use the common pool data in new analyses and replicate our data collection models for countries not in our initial country pool. A third form of success would see the data collection routines that we develop spread and be used by new researchers around the world. This would be traceable, over time, through citation metrics and the use of our data collection routine.

Total Budget: 15400

Affiliations: This project is drawn from ongoing conversations among researchers doing work on economic elites. Several of us met recently at an international conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, specifically at the annual conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). We organized a small ‘mini-conference’ within the larger SASE conference, which connected scholars from the Global North and the Global South. Individuals listed here were both involved directly in this mini-conference and in conversation with extending these cooperative endeavors through though this project proposal. They currently represent themselves as individuals and are not representatives of their respective organizations. This does not include the full list of individuals that will be involved in the project, but rather the list of people who are involved in this application and thus the initial stage of the project’s beginning. From institutions in the Global North: Kevin L Young, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, USA Victoria Gronwald, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, UK Mike Savage, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, UK Bruno Cousin, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics, Sciences Po, Paris, France Graziela Moraes Dia Da Silva, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Geneva Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland From institutions in the Global South: Felix Lopez, Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Elisa Reis, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil William Echeverría, Universidad UTE, Quito, Ecuador Gabriel Otero, Faculty of Economics, Government and Communications, Universidad Central de Chile Gustavo Ferrati, Federal University of Sao Carlos, Sao Paulo, Brazil Naim Bro, School of Government, Universidad Adolfo Ibanez, Santiago, Chile Glauber Eduardo Goncalves, Federal University of Sao Carlos, Sao Paulo, Brazil

LMIE Carveout: Our entire project is based on facilitating cooperation among researchers across the Global South and Global North. The working locations of team members will be dispersed for this reason. The ‘data governance coordinator’ will be from the Global South and one will be from the Global North. All in-person meetings will be held in the Global South, and will bring together other researchers from across the Global South based on the location of the meeting. There is an emphasis on several Latin American countries at this initial phase, in particular Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador. These countries are in the LMIE group. We hope to gather more from the region as our project develops. Our team members have extensive connections to researchers across the region and to other parts of Global South.

Team Skills: The proposed project team consists of researchers with a range of experience studying economic elites. They come from a variety of disciplines, such as sociology, public policy, political science and economics. Several team members have long careers as academics conducting empirical and theoretical research on elites and elite power. We each bring different skills but in particular have experience with large-scale data collection and generation efforts involving people-centered and organizational affiliation data. A particular strength of this group in terms of methods are the use of geographic correspondence analysis (GDA), cluster analysis and network analysis. Collecting data on elites often means knowing where to look and how to find information based on knowledge of the given country or countries where a given elite type are situated, knowing the media and in particular business press landscape as these become valuable sources. All team members have extensive experience with this kind of work and have national country expertise in their respective countries. We hope to leverage the extensive research networks within the group to reach out to others across the Global South to collaborate with us as the project grows and once we build a firm foundation.

Submission Number: 193