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Big news! Today, we received word that the Romanian Academic Society (SAR) earned a grant to implement its Global Integrity Impact Challenge project proposal. With this new funding, SAR will conduct a year-long assessment on the effectiveness of transparency and accountability mechanisms in the Romania’s energy procurement process — a weakness noted in the Global…

In the overlap of technology and democracy, Brazil is an early adopter (see here, here). So it’s no surprise to find a Brazilian journalism group leading the way with online training for journalists on how to use government data to tell stories. ABRAJI (short for the Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo) arms journalists with information…

Our first post in an ongoing series exploring the transformation of journalism and what that means for democracy. Journalist and media critic Anne Elizabeth Moore describes the forces that are inadvertently silencing political speech in the United States. Sometimes, accidental policy can do a lot of damage. In the spring of 2006, Time-Warner, the largest…

In what we would describe as an old fashioned case of narrow legal analysis getting in the way of common sense, the U.S. Supreme Court has today seen fit to overturn several longstanding controls over the amount of money that large corporate interests and unions can spend to influence elections. Because it’s not like campaign…

The pervasive influence of drug cartels in Mexico is, by now, a fixture in the media and public imagination. Since the beginning of Felipe Calderón’s tenure as President of Mexico, his administration has taken a more aggressive stance against the Mexican drug cartels. During Calderón’s presidency there has been increased violence especially in the cities…

Contrary to what its name may imply, “flexians” — the subject of the anthropologist and public policy scholar Janine Wedel’s stimulating new book Shadow Elite— are not alien beings from an episode of Star Trek. Rather, they are a relatively new, distinctly terrestrial constellation of actors who are remolding the landscape of global governance. Emblematic…