Two post you may find interesting:
SPLUNK’D: Federal Election Commission Campaign Finance Data
and,
Spluk4Good Announces public data project highlighting FEC Campaign Finance Data
The project reveals answers to our burning questions:
- What state gives the most?
- Which state gives the most per capita? (Bet you won’t guess this one!)
- What does aggregate giving look like visualized over the election cycle?
- Is your city more Red or more Blue?
- What does a map viz with drilldown reveal about giving by zip codes or cities?
- What occupation gives the most?
- Are geologists more Red or more Blue (Hint: think about where geologist live and who they work for!)
Impressive performance but some of my burning questions would be:
- Closing which tax loopholes would impact particular taxpayers who contributed to X political campaign?
- Which legislative provisions benefits particular taxpayers or their investments?
- Which regulations by federal agencies benefit particular taxpayers or their businesses?
The FEC data isn’t all you would need to answer those questions. But the answers are known.
Someone asked for the benefits in all three cases. Someone wrote the laws, regulations or loop holes with the intent to grant those benefits.
Not all of those are dishonest. Consider the charitable contributions that sustain fine art, music, libraries and research that benefits all of us.
There are other benefits that are less benign.
To identify the givers, recipients, legislation/regulation and the benefit, would require collocation of data from disparate domains and vocabularies.
Interested?