Data science meets political economy: Applications to legislative favouritism around the world

Recent trends towards greater availability of data sources and the digitisation of political institutions" records into machine-readable formats present a unique opportunity for social and political scientists. By integrating data science methodologies with substantive domain knowledge, researchers can effectively probe theoretical propositions that have remained complex to unravel. This chapter, grounded in recent advances in political science and political economy, reflects on these emerging opportunities. As an illustrative case, it introduces the concept of legislative favouritism, which denotes the enactment of laws that disproportionately benefit specific firms or groups over others. Despite the secretive nature of legislative favouritism, which poses significant challenges as neither the recipient nor the provider of such laws has an interest in disclosing potentially incriminating information, the growing adoption of data science methods can - to some extent - overcome this issue and offer a variety of advantages. To demonstrate this, the chapter relies on more than 316,797 legislative observations in 12 countries around the world and introduces four quantitative indicators of legislative favouritism. Overall, we argue that the approach presented holds considerable promise, but key questions remain regarding the ability of data availability and data science to offer scalable and viable solutions for governance.