telecommunications ownership | Lisa Garbe | Personal Website | Research & Publications

The political power of internet business: A comprehensive dataset of Telecommunications Ownership and Control (TOSCO)

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Blocking the Bottleneck: Internet Shutdowns and Ownership at Election Times in Sub-Saharan Africa

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Elite Networks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This project explores how elite networks shape politics and affect political inequality. Joint work with researchers at the University of St.Gallen and the University of Frankfurt examines the networks between foreign-authoritarian shareholders of internet-providing companies and their role in tightening control over local internet provision using data from the TOSCO project.

More recent work together with researchers at WZB explores the role that networks between political and business elites play in shaping political inequality. We currently pilot a data collection and coding of news paper articles using LLMs to assess the possibility of analyzin elite connections at scale. We further analyse the effect of connections between Members of Parliament and business elites on housing markets in the German context.

Telecommunications Ownership and Control

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This project is motivated by the observation that empirical studies on the determinants and effects of internet access typically treat the internet as a “black box” neglecting the different actors involved in providing and manipulating internet access. Together with researchers at the University of St.Gallen and the University of Melbourne, we provide the first large-scale data collection of telecommunications companies and their shareholders, the Telecommunications and and Control (TOSCO) data set.

Published papers related to this project introduce the TOSCO data set and showcase its importance in evaluating the effect of internet penetration on political outcomes such as democratization and corruption. We further provide a dashboard making the data set available to other researchers and showcasing different aggregations of the data set.