Rethinking revolving door research: a scoping review of methods and datasets used by non-academics to examine the revolving door

TL;DR

This paper reviews how non-academics study the revolving door between public and private sectors, highlighting data challenges and reuse opportunities.

Contribution

A novel scoping review framework for assessing revolving door data use and reuse by non-academics.

Findings

Most revolving door data records came from NGOs, media, and government in Australia, the UK, and the US.

Fossil fuels and defense sectors were the most studied industries in revolving door analyses.

Only three records showed high data use or reuse, indicating limited accessibility and reusability.

Abstract

Business lobbying is a risk to public health. Evidence demonstrates that corporations seek to block, delay and otherwise undermine the development and implementation of policies that they view as threatening to their profits (such as warning labels on alcohol or tobacco taxes). Yet, corporate political influence has proven immensely challenging to study, with data often missing, incomplete or fragmented. This paper is part of a larger research program that seeks to develop methods to analyse corporate political activities. In this paper, we explore different approaches and datasets used by non-academics to examine the revolving door: the movement of individuals between public and private sector employment. To date, there is limited public health research on this topic. Our aims were twofold: first, to understand what aspects of the revolving door have been explored outside academia, and second, to understand how useable and reuseable the datasets and resources were.

We conducted a systematic scoping review of grey literature in Australia, the United States and United Kingdom. We developed a simple framework to assess six features of revolving door data use and reuse: downloadable; interactive features; dates; job titles and employers; context; and dataset size.

We identified 41 records: 17 from Australia, 10 from the UK and 14 from the USA. Most originated from non-governmental organisations, followed by media and government. Of the records that focused on a specific industry, fossil fuels were most common followed by the defence and weapons sector. Only three records demonstrated a high level of data use or reuse.

Our study highlights a range of different data sources that could be explored in future studies as well as strategies to make data more reusable. It also reveals some of the challenges of studying the revolving door, including intellectual property and privacy laws. As public health researchers increasingly study the political activities of businesses, they must carefully consider how to balance efforts to make data more accessible for policymakers and advocates, while not unfairly compromising individual privacy.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12992-025-01184-7.

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