Politicians raise millions of dollars to fund their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws. While many people know this, they are do not know how much our money-dominated system affects them and the issues they care about.
Mapping Money and Politics is a “mashup“ showing campaign contributions on a map. It provides unprecedented transparency, providing an informative and appealing way to compare candidates and track special-interest giving.
Watch the video tour of Mapping Money and Politics
With this groundbreaking project, anyone can create, view, and share maps of contributions from the oil industry, labor unions, or any other interest influencing government. You can compare candidates, to see who has the most local support and whose financial support comes from out-of-state. You can even display income, ethnic, and other demographic information along with campaign contributions, to better understand what neighborhoods and populations have a greater or lesser stake in our democracy.
Mapping Money and Politics lets you zoom from a map of the whole U.S. down to your local neighborhood. We aim to illuminate the connection between special-interest campaign dollars and your own state, town, and neighborhood.
Looking at the country through the lens of campaign contributions helps you see the distorted terrain our legislators work in. It’s no wonder they can’t take straight action on the serious problems facing our country.
Mapping Money and Politics is a visual mash-up--it’s better to see it than read about it. Watch our 3-minute project tour now.
You can choose from a range of current issues, legislators and interest groups. You can compare them at the national, state, or local level, across time or against each other.
You can interact with campaign contributions to the politicians who represent you in Congress and, eventually, in your state and for your town. Does your elected official represent your interests? Our maps showing bases of support--both in your area and outside of it--help answer that question.
MAPLight.org pioneered the combination of campaign dollars and politicians' votes when we launched our U.S. Congress site in May 2007. Our site, a large-scale mashup, reveals patterns of money and influence in unprecedented ways. For an overview, view our 6-minute Video Tour.
Our work has been featured by the New York Times, The Nation, Wired, and many others. We are the winners of the inaugural NetSquared Innovation Award and the prestigous U.N.-affiliated World Summit Award.
We need:
Read about our data sources.
MAPLight.org also publishes widgets tracking funds raised by all candidates for President and U.S. Congress, plus an API that lets programmers include candidates' fundraising data on their own websites.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
TechSoup, CompuMentor. 2008. Share our content.
Comments
Passionate about Money and Politics
We were honored to win first prize last year, and we recognize that some in the community might feel as you do, Keith. However, we are passionate about what we do and owe it to our supporters and ourselves to pursue any opportunity to do it better.
By being part of this year’s contest we have already benefited from ideas and guidance from the Google hack-a-thon, and we look forward to receiving more constructive suggestions from the broad NetSquared community as we see new and better ways to track money and politics. We feel that it is fully within the spirit of cooperation engendered by all the good people at NetSquared for us to enter again, and we checked with them first before doing so.
Dan Newman, MAPLight.org
Maplight. Again?
Maplight.org. Again? You won last year. You have received thousands already. Step aside and give others the chance to win this year.