Tracking Corruption on Capitol Hill

Where is the money supporting your legislators and senators coming from? What industries are supporting each party? Who is on your side in politics?

Grace Odmark and Celeste Mannel

We sourced our data from Open Secrets which contains APIs open to the public to use. The data contains information on many current legislators and senators including top donors to each senator and legislator, amount contributed, and donations made by specific industries. We cleaned the data and used it to analyze whether certain states, industries, and ideologies gain funding from specific groups. Additionally, we used an API which "scored" senators and legislators ideology to determine which side these individuals truly lean.

Donations by Industry

The above chart describes which industries support each respective part with the most donations. The graph shows that some indstries, such as retired donors, real estate companies, and health professionals tend to make the same number of donations to each party, which other parties such as construction services, oil and gas, education and public sector unions tend to direct most donations one way or the other.

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Top 10 Industries by Party

The above graphics show the monetary quantity of the 10 donation groups for each party. The graphs show that, while the quantities of the donations are relatively similar across the board for the democratic party, republican donors who are retired or a part of real estate donate much more to candidates that the other donors represented.

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Breakdown by Company

The above graphic is the breakdown of how much specific companies donate to each party. This tool allows consumers to consider whether the companies they support give to the party the consumer alligns with. Additionally, this a good tool to consider the trends across an industry. For example, the above example suggests that healthcare companies donate to republicans, democrats, and independents, even though at differing amounts.

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Ideology Breakdown by State

These visualizations present the frequency of donations given to opposite sides of the political aisle of the chosen state. The user selects a state from a drop down menu, and the graph shows the donations given to candidates of a range of ideological scores, 1 being most left-wing and increasingly more right-wing across the x-axis.

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Donations by Ideology

These visualizations present the total amount of donations received by candidates, ranked by their ideology. By slider, the user selects an ideological score to focus on, 1 being most left-wing and 100 being most right-wing, and the graph will show senators and their donations, ranked left to right respectively, within the range of ideological scores the user chose.

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Choropleth Breakdown

This choropleth graphs the political ideology that is most funded in each state. To do this, a score is calculated that represents how well funded an ideology is in that state. Using senator donations and their ideological data, a score for each state is calculated and then converted to a color range, 0 (blue) being the most left-wing, and 100 (yellow) being the most right-wing.