Visualizing the Influence of Money in Politics

Data is a key part in educating people on what’s really going on in the country. There’s a river of money underlying everything that happens in politics, everything that happens in Congress, but a member of Congress is never going to stand up and say, “Sure, this money influenced my vote.” And an interest group is never going to tell you, “This money influenced that vote.” But the data can tell you when money influences votes. We use data to tell people in a compelling way what’s happening.

Our philosophy is we put the facts out there, and you decide. One of the amazing things about the web is that we can actually put out all of our data. We can put out summaries of it. We can put out details of it. And people can use Tableau Public to interact with it. They can both see the overall findings and get the deeper picture.

Everyone coming to our website has something different in mind. People want to know the averages, sure. But, they also want to know, “What about my law-maker?”, “What about the oil industry?”, or “What about this particular bill or company I care about?” By making it interactive, it’s an entry point into the data, so people can create for themselves an individual and customized experience.

Another project we did with Tableau Public was a map that looked at where California lawmakers get their money—like from business groups or laborers, and so on. One of our findings was that 40% of the money in California politics comes directly from business groups like trade associations and businesses actually writing the checks. Now that 40% number is shocking, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a lot of variation. There was one lawmaker who got 87% of his money, almost all of his money, directly from business groups. And on the low end, another lawmaker got only 4% of his money from business groups. If you look at money from unions, from labor, 16% of the money overall came from labor groups. But that’s not the whole story. The top lawmaker got 41% of his money from labor groups, quite a lot. And then there was another lawmaker that got absolutely none.

We published this information in Tableau Public. You can see the summaries, but you can also see each lawmaker with nifty interactive bar graphs for each funding category, in red or blue depending on whether the lawmaker is Republican or Democrat. You can scan down the columns and see the variation. Another finding in our study was that political parties, which contribute money to political campaigns of these candidates, only fund a handful of candidates, typically in close races. So if you look down that column, you can see certain lawmakers have a bar graph for political parties and others have almost none. That’s the kind of interesting finding in the data that the visualization makes so much easier for both us and the members of the public that see it on our site.

I thought it was interesting that it’s not just MAPLight that finds these visualizations of value, but also a major newspaper would find that too. And that was of value for us as another way to tell the story better, another way to interest this news publication and their audience in what we do. That’s one example of the proven value.

If you put a bar chart in a newspaper, that’s a format that’s been around for many decades, and we know that people can understand it. But when you put that same bar chart on the web, do you make so that people mouse over and see something? Do they have to click on it? How do you describe it to them? How do you let them dig in in a way that doesn’t become overwhelmingly complex? That’s a very hard thing to design. I think that the tools are starting to be there, but the design has to catch up.

We use the Tableau Public library to build in another level of complexity—one that’s well suited for all the different findings that we have. Sometimes we’re looking at one committee of Congress. Sometimes we’re looking at one member of Congress.  Sometimes it’s one industry. There’s no one size fits all way to say, “What is going to be interesting and where is the diversity happening?” The diversity of visualizations in Tableau Public and the flexibility of it is a real asset that we can actually publish visual information about some of these stories beyond the standard visualizations that are available throughout our site.

The other trend is the increasing use of the web, which of course is only going to continue to increase over time. People are becoming more sophisticated, not just using email but doing more sophisticated searching and using the web for different purposes.

So we have this intersection of more sophisticated users and more data available. Tableau Public is at that intersection. It takes these data sets, it makes them more visual, and it’s a way to interface to these more sophisticated users. It’s certainly not the only thing going on in the sphere, but the concept and execution are very important components in these two trends coming together.