The European Union (EU) is infamous for the high level of lobbying activity surrounding political decisions. It is also famous for its (rather) transparent monitoring of interest groups. The EU makes a transparency register public, where lobbies must register to get access to the European institutions. They can optionally disclose some information, such as the number of lobbyists, their costs, and their sector of activity. This information is, however, sparse and incomplete, if ever accurate.
We have collected a large dataset of text data, which was scraped from the websites of the interest groups in the transparency register. These data contain information related to their positions on various issues. In this project, you will first analyze these data, for example by clustering the interest groups based on their positions, by identifying topics of discussion and persons, etc.
Second, you will cross-correlate these data with data related to the European Parliament, such as legislative amendments proposed by Parliamentarians and speeches in parliamentary plenary sessions. This should enable us to better understand the interactions between European politicians and lobbyists.
If interested, please send your CV and a transcript of your grades to aswin.suresh@epfl.ch and victor.kristof@epfl.ch.