Delegate interactions at the 1984 national party conventions: The Tennessee delegations

This study compares the activities of the Democratic and Republican delegations from Tennessee to the 1984 national nominating conventions. Although the two delegations were quite similar in personal attributes, their activities varied contextually with the different circumstances surrounding the two conventions. While the Democratic convention was a genuinely decision-making assembly making for wide dispersion of delegation members' activities, the Republican convention turned the delegates into recipients of party appeals for unified support of the presidential as well as congressional and gubernatorial candidates. The decision of the Republicans to conduct their 1988 convention under the same rules as in 1984, in contrast to the Democrats' decision to have a commission create new rules for 1988, was inevitable given the different contexts of the two conventions.     

An Objective Corruption Risk Index Using Public Procurement Data

In order to address the lack of reliable indicators of corruption, this article develops a composite indicator of high-level institutionalised corruption through a novel ‘Big Data’ approach. Using publicly available electronic public procurement records in Hungary, we identify “red flags” in the public procurement process and link them to restricted competition and recurrent contract award to the same company. We use this method to create a corruption indicator at contract level that can be aggregated to the level of individual organisations, sectors, regions and countries. Because electronic public procurement data is available in virtually all developed countries from about the mid-2000s, this method can generate a corruption index based on objective data that is consistent over time and across countries. We demonstrate the validity of the corruption risk index by showing that firms with higher corruption risk score had relatively higher profitability, higher ratio of contract value to initial estimated price, greater likelihood of politicians managing or owning them and greater likelihood of registration in tax havens, than firms with lower scores on the index. In the conclusion we discuss the uses of this data for academic research, investigative journalists, civil society groups and small and medium business.