Swiss Politicians' Ties: A Comprehensive Dataset

Abstract

Focusing on the of 49th Swiss legislature, we build a dataset about the politicians' links with lobbying groups. We approximate political ties considering three dimensions: (1) politicians' mandates in legal entities; (2) their professions, and (3) the enterprises, associations and other organizations related to the recipients of access rights provided by politicians. This research note proposes an objective and integrated way to classify the links coming from different sources by using codes of the General Classification of Economic Activities (NOGA2008). We find that the three dimensions used to approximate politicians' links are complementary, each of them containing additional information. Our results also show that politicians' interests distribution across economic categories depends on political group, gender and geographical origin.