MapLight tracks the influence of money in politics via maps

For those who need to know the geographic origin of contributions to legislators by state and by companies and other political contribution information, MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization that tracks the influence of money in politics, recently announced the launch of an extensive mapping project. This project examines the following (from the press release): geographic origin of contributions to legislators by state; contributions from companies to legislators by state; and roll call votes by state and district on key bills in Congress.

This project will shed light on how money from outside sources influences local political campaigns and also will show from what geographic locations money is contributed to key legislative initiatives.

These are some of the maps that MapLight has developed so far:

• Legislator Map: Who in Your State Has Contributed to Majority Leader Candidate Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)?

• Voting Map: How Did Your House Rep. Vote on The Farm Bill?
• Donor Map: Comcast Peppers Lawmakers Across the Country with Donations 

MapLight uses the latest available data from the Federal Election Commission as of April 14, 2014 to analyze campaign contributions in each of the above cases for a given election cycle of period of time.

According to their website,

MapLight connects money and votes. “We bring together, in one website, the money given to politicians with each politician’s votes.

We provide data, research services, and online tools that work together to make patterns of money and influence more transparent. Connections between campaign contributions, interest groups and votes that would have required days or weeks of manual research are now available at the click of a mouse.

We currently track money and votes for the U.S. Congress and the California and Wisconsin state legislatures. You can stay up-to-date on our work via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter.”

Tags: geospatial, GIS, location, mapping

Categories: Big Data, geospatial, GIS, mapping

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2014 at 12:43 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.