Our friends at IssueLab have a round-up of public interest research on US voting and elections that provides a refreshingly substantive break from the faux empiricism of daily tracking polls and instant pundit scorecards. IssueLab’s key findings: Racial disparities in the criminal justice system translate into higher rates of disenfranchisement in communities of color, resulting…
Norah Mallaney reports from the launch of the IREX Media Sustainability Index, which examines the working conditions for independent media worldwide. Today, the Center for International Media Assistance hosted an event to publicize the release of the International Resource and Exchanges Board’s (IREX) Media Sustainability Index (MSI). This report “provides in-depth analyses of the conditions…
Corruption in Afghanistan becomes an issue in the the US Presidential race, but solutions are hard to come by. In the September 26 presidential debate, both Obama and McCain acknowledged the potential security risk that Afghanistan holds for the United States. Obama repeatedly expressed his concern of the growing opium economy is Afghanistan. In a…
The second annual installment of the Ibrahim governance index, which aggregates third-party and original data to create a five point scorecard in every country in Sub-Saharan Africa. The summary lays out the Ibrahim Foundation’s focus: The essential political goods can be summarized and gathered under five categories: Safety and Security; Rule of Law, Transparency, and…
With talk of “Google for Government” highlighting budget transparency, we take a look at the US Congress’s performance on the issue compared to other nations, and take USAspending.gov for a test drive. A week ago in the first presidential debate, Senator Barack Obama mentioned he worked with Senator Tom Coburn “to set up what we…
Daniel Kaufmann’s Governance Matters blog comments on our recent work, A Users’ Guide to Measuring Corruption. Dr. Kaufmann is director of the World Bank’s Global Governance group. While Daniel Kaufmann and company have previously detailed their own views on corruption metrics, we are pleased to see that on several of the key points discussed in…