In Depth with Campaign Finance Data by Ethan Phelps-Goodman.
Introduction
Influence Explorer and TransparencyData are the Sunlight Foundation’s two main sources for data on money and influence in politics. Both sites are warehouses for a variety of datasets, including campaign finance, lobbying, earmarks, federal spending and various other corporate accountability datasets. The underlying data is the same for both sites, but the presentation is very different. Influence Explorer takes the most important or prominent entities in the data–such as state and federal politicians, well-known individuals, and large companies and organizations–and gives each its own page with easy to understand charts and graphs. TransparencyData, on the other hand, gives searchable access to the raw records that make up each Influence Explorer page. Influence Explorer can answer questions like, “who was the top donor to Obama’s presidential campaign?” TransparencyData lets you dig down into the details of every single donation to that campaign.
If you are interested in campaign finance data this is a very good starting point. At least you can get a sense for the difficulty in simply tracking the money. I think you will find that money can buy access, but that isn’t the same thing as influence. That more complicated.
Topic maps can help in several ways. First, there is the ability to consolidate information from a variety of sources so no one person has to try to assemble all the pieces. Second, the use of associations can help you discover patterns in relationships that may uncover some hidden (or relatively so) avenues of influence or access. Not to mention that being able to trade-up information with others, may help you build a better portfolio of data for when you go calling to exercise some influence.
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