An analysis of 240 national policies enacted between 1994 and 2024 shows that the survival of a public decision depends less on the consensus at its origin than on the existence of a career bureaucracy and predictable rules of revision.
We surveyed 148 algorithmic systems in use across 24 jurisdictions. Fewer than one in five document how they were trained, and only eleven let the affected person learn the criteria behind the decision.
Institutional project · 2025–2028
A four-year research programme on the decisions that will define Argentina's next decade: macroeconomic stability, state capacity, energy and the science system.
Argentine R&D spending has been stagnant below 0.6% of GDP for fifteen years. The problem is not only the level: it is the variance, which makes planning a research career impossible.
We track workers across twenty years of household surveys. Informality has ceased to be an entry stage into the labour market and become a stable condition for almost four in ten wage earners.
Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Lima share a pattern: a school's social composition predicts learning outcomes better than a student's individual socioeconomic status.
The reform improves the integrity of the electoral act and does not solve the underlying problem, which is campaign finance.
We publish the simulator and microdata that allow the incidence to be reproduced under four alternative definitions of the basic basket.
Every short-term refinancing transfers decision-making power from the budget to the market. Extending maturities is an institutional reform, not merely a financial one.
Repatriation programmes work when they offer a laboratory and continuity, not when they offer rhetoric and a one-year contract.
The state buys software with the same tools it uses to buy office supplies. The result is vendor lock-in and loss of control over data.
Basin committees exist on paper in fourteen water systems and operate with their own budget in three.
Featured essay
If freedom consists in not depending on another's arbitrary will, then material inequality is not a problem separate from freedom: it is one of its forms.
Institutions are not slow by design flaw. They are slow because their function is to sustain decisions beyond the moment in which they are popular.
Cognitive development gaps are in place before school entry. Education policy that arrives in first grade arrives late.
We measure the burden of unpaid care and its effect on labour participation. Care infrastructure is employment policy.
Buenos Aires
Online
Córdoba
Buenos Aires
The Russell Project is a research institute in public policy and democratic thought, based in Buenos Aires and working across Latin America. We produce evidence, policy proposals and public debate on the institutional conditions of development and democratic life. We answer to no party, government or company: our conclusions are published in full, with open data and code.
The institute in figures
