Countering Illiberal Influences through Open Government

Around the world, authoritarian governments are mounting a persistent challenge to liberal democracies and institutions by compromising political parties, spreading disinformation, and exerting pressure through secretive loans and investment deals. 

Against this backdrop, OGP and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) produced a series of three policy briefs identifying concrete openness and oversight measures that governments can use to build resilience against covert, foreign-sponsored influences. OGP members can use these briefs as guides to develop future action planAction plans are at the core of a government’s participation in OGP. They are the product of a co-creation process in which government and civil society jointly develop commitments to open governmen... commitments to strengthen the resilience of their national systems. 

• Foreign political finance brief: Covert foreign political finance is often secretly channeled to parties and candidates through proxies to interfere in political and electoral processes. This brief was developed in partnership with Transparency International. Click here to get started.

• Foreign debt opacity brief: Global sovereign debtOpenly disclosing information about government debt enables informed decision-making, mitigates the risk of financial instability, and allows citizens to hold their governments accountable for respons... More is at a 50-year record high. Opaque lending arrangements often use national wealth and public goods as collateral, creating preferential treatment for authoritarian governments.

• Foreign-sponsored disinformation brief: Foreign-sponsored disinformation operations have become a feature of political life around the world and a threat multiplier in other domains.