UnfluenceBlog

… because we funded by Oil Change International built a whole ‘nuther site dealing with just Oil contributions to Federal candidates: http://oilmoney.priceofoil.org

Read a bit more about it here.

Recently discovered that the NIMSP panel of the popup got broken after the NIMSP site reorg. Fixed now, thanks Ken!. We also updated the query panel so you cane make graphs for 2008, in the few states that have data available yet.

Great minds think alike. Marco Borgna just contacted us to tell us about a nice Java/prefuse application he built to show networks of contributions to US governors races using NIMSP data. Check it out at http://weshowthemoney.com/

A nice feature is that it is shows data combined for multiple states, so you can get a picture of the activity of unions and PACs at the national level.

Are there any similar projects showing EU data?

Thanks to fast work from our sysadmin, everything seems to be working again! Yea primate, thanks Aaron!

Ooops. Just went to generate some maps and discovered that our site is seriously broken. We didn’t discover for a while, because it was still serving up the cached versions of the maps. But a week or so ago I reset the cache, and now no maps are being generated. Greg did a bit of debugging and it looks like ghostscript (the component used by imagemagik to convert neato’s postscript output to png for the web page) somehow got uninstalled on our server) We should have it back up in the next day or so.

Apologies to everyone who has visited the site and gotten empty images. Really, that’s not how it used to work, I promise

P.S. If you try something, and it doesn’t seem to work, please email us to let us know. skyebend[put the email at sign in here]skyeome.net

David Lazer writes about Katie Selenski’s work with the FEC contribution data. Locating “hedgers” - individuals who gave the maximum amount to multiple candidates. Some of the data is presented in a networkish form instead of a crosstab

Again, there are a large number of top executives. And, unsurprisingly, there are more Clinton-Obama hedgers than Giuliani-Obama or Giuliani-Clinton. But there are still a remarkable number of folks in the latter two categories. Some interesting patterns: there are more attorneys who do a Clinton-Giulianai hedge than Obama-Giuliani, and more people from finance who go the Obama-Giuliani path. Presumably this reflects the underlying social structure of campaign contributions—e.g., one imagines that many individuals are recruited to contribute by associates, and may have associates who belong to different candidate camps.

Recently bumped into this interactive flash app and pdf showing funding links from Bush’s fund raising network. From a washington post article in 2004. Nice work Sarah Cohen and Louis Spirito!

Cool, we got mentioned in the LA times today:

The more civic-minded Unfluence (unfluence.net) uses information from a campaign finance database to diagram the web of crisscrossing donations between candidates and various industries. And if you go to whoissick.org, one glance at the map reveals that numerous people in the Los Angeles area are reporting runny noses.

Sorry for the cross-blogging, but I posted an example of a multi-mode network including a bill, legislators, votes, and contributions. Based on data from MAPLight.org:

Tho not strictly related to unfluence, I recently came across The Budget Graph, a giant poster-sized network map of US Federal spending.

Includes an online viewer so you can scroll around on it