American Politics

Campaign finance project by Adam Bonica at Stanford as part of a project to ideologically map political elites, interest groups, and donors in the "political marketplace". The resulting database contains over 850 million political contributions made by individuals and organizations to local, state, and federal elections from 1979 to 2024. A corresponding database of candidates and committees provides additional information on state and federal elections. Data has been extensively cleaned, standardized, and geocoded.

Parses Congressional Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) reports to provide better coding of lobbying data by linking them to congressional bills and their sponsors, industry and issue areas, and company identifiers. Also includes LASER, a project with disambiguated and detailed lobbyist-level data matched to individual biographic characteristics (demographics, political connections/experience, occupation). Bulk data downloads as well as an API are available. 2000-2024.

Great source for data and analysis on campaign finance at the federal level. Covers contributions to candidates and PACs; campaign spending by outside groups; lobbying and interest groups; personal finances of politicians and the revolving door of politicians to lobbyists; political ad buys; and more. From the Center for Responsive Politics. 1998+ Bulk data freely available for non-commercial use.

While no longer updated, this helpful list of key campaign finance terms from the Sunlight Foundation can help you navigate this jargon-laden space. For more technical and legal definitions, see the FEC's guides; there's also a pop-up glossary of terms linked at the top of the page.

Since 2009, the House has published disbursements online in .csv format (see the ProPublica link below for cleaned, Excel versions of the 2009-2023 data). For historical data, Boston Public Library and the Internet Archive digitized the Statement of Disbursements of the House (1995-present) and the Report of the Clerk of the House (1970-1995), a quarterly report on expenditures by the House, including salaries of staffers and expenses by committees and Members' offices.

Details the official spending done by the House of Representatives, including lawmakers’ offices, committee offices, and administrative offices, using the official House Statement of Disbursements (see below). One file contains summary information for each office and category of spending, and the other file contains details of each recipient of office spending and its purpose. Note that the data has not been standardized (meaning that "AT&T" might also appear as "A.T.&T."). Quarterly files from 2009-present in .csv. A single file containing 2009-2018 is also available.

"Financial Disclosure Reports include information about the source, type, amount, or value of the incomes of Members, officers, certain employees of the U.S. House of Representatives and related offices, and candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives." 2008–present.

Financial disclosures by Senators and candidates since January 1, 2012. Senator reports are available until six years after the individual ceases to be a Member. Candidate reports are available for one year after the individual is no longer a candidate.

Semi-annual report detailing expenditures by the Senate, including salaries of officers and employees and spending by committees and Members' offices. (Search on "Report of the Secretary of the Senate" in title for Documents/Reports and Misc Publications)

Click on Gift/Rule Travel tab. Option to search or download entire database. Senate rules state that "the information must be maintained for a period not longer than four years after receiving the information."

Information on Congressional salaries, trips, financial disclosures, foreign gifts, earmarks, and more. Salary data on members and staffers from 2000-present; data on privately financed trips from 2000-present; financial disclosures from 2001-present; foreign gifts from 1999-present; earmarks for fiscal years 2008-2010. Limited personal access with free registration.

Data and reports on money and spending in state-level politics. Covers campaign finance donations, spending by outside groups, and spending on ballot measures for all 50 states. You can view national or state overviews of spending; get breakdowns by district, candidate, party, industry, incumbency status, and more. The National Institute on Money in State Politics cleans, verified, and standardizes the data. Data can be exported in CSV, XML, or JSON. 1988+. Note: has merged with OpenSecrets and when integration completes, FTM's site will be sunsetted.

Download itemized and trend data and filings for contributions and disbursements by/for candidates, committees, PACs, and independent expenditures. Bulk downloads of detailed data are available.

Covers contributions to and expenditures by political 527 organizations, which are tax-exempt nonprofits formed under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code "whose primary purpose is attempting to influence the election of one or more people to public office at the national, state, or local level." Having been parsed from self-filings, data can have duplicates, typos, and other errors and names/addresses are not normalized. Data is searchable and can be downloaded to csv, up to 2500 rows.

Links to the official state agency websites for campaign finance, elections, and lobbyist disclosures. From Follow The Money.

NO LONGER UPDATED. Historical data on congressional and presidential election fundraising, expenditures, and party, interest group, and PAC spending. Tables and figures are in PDF and cover 1974-2018. Many of these tables are available in Excel (with a slight time lag) from the Vital Statistics on Congress (see chapter 3 on Campaign Finance in Congressional Elections). CFI also produces also other reports as well as a useful Money in Politics Bibliography covering academic literature back to 2006.

The National Conference of State Legislatures compiles information on laws and regulations governing campaign finance in all 50 states. It has separate sections on contribution limits, independent expenditures, disclosure requirements, and public financing of elections. Mostly current with some coverage of previous years. Its database of campaign finance legislation goes back to 2015 and is searchable by year, state, type of legislation and status.

The Campaign Finance Institute has compiled a database of state campaign finance laws covering every state, 1996-2018. There's a visualization tool allowing for easy comparison across key variables and the full database can be downloaded to access more than 500 variables per state-year.

MapLight, a nonpartisan research center, collected over 200,000 positions taken by interest groups on proposed federal legislation at various points in the legislative process, 2007-2022. Fields include Congressional session, bill number and name, type of legislative action, a flag for whether the action was substantive, organization name and ID, position (support/oppose), date, and title of position document. Data in Excel.

Database of documents required to be filed by lobbyists under the Lobbying and Disclosure Act (LDA). Database can be searched or downloaded (by quarter), 1999-.

Online database to search lobbying filings back to 2011. Results can be downloaded to .csv, XML, or JSON.

Links to the official state agency websites for campaign finance, elections, and lobbyist disclosures. From Follow The Money.

The Center for Political Accountability tracks disclosure practices of corporate political spending of the top 300 companies in the S&P 500. It creates an annual index, the CPA-Zicklin Index, ranking companies' disclosure transparency. 2011+

Includes information about thousands of organizations involved in national politics, their organizational characteristics, and the activities they undertook in the pursuit of policy influence. This collection encompasses all organizations listed in the Washington Representatives directories for 1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, and 2011. These organizations have been classified into 96 categories based on the kinds of interests represented. Variables include organization name, membership category, founding year, and main objective, as well as number of lobbyists hired, number of amicus briefs filed, political action committee (PAC) donations made, and web-based lobbying activities.

Replication data for Maxwell Palmer and Benjamin Schneer, "Postpolitical Careers: How Politicians Capitalize on Public Office," The Journal of Politics 81, no. 2 (April 2019): 670-675. Covers more than 1200 former top office holders from 1992-2014 and codes whether they were paid lobbyists or served on boards of public corporations.

Database of Earmarks from a nonpartisan group. FY 2008-2010 currently available online for download in Excel.

Database of earmarks from the Office of Management and Budget covering FY2005, 2008, 2009, and 2010. Data is searchable and browseable, and can also be downloaded as a CSV.

Comprehensive scrape of the Federal Procurement Data System, covering 100 million contract actions, primarily 1979-2023. Codes 470 variables, including timestamps and geolocations; contract data; contracting agency codes; and vendor variables. Data is in YYYY-MM parquet shards as well as a reduced CSV version (25 gb) with 11 frequently used fields (contract ID, signing date, agency, NAICS, obligated dollars, place-of-performance ZIP code, state, and indicators for small, minority-, or women-owned vendors). Authors also provide an R package, fpdsScraper (on CRAN), to facilitate dynamic querying, scraping, and loading of data into R from the FPDS website. Caution: various investigations and reports have highlighted errors and missing data from the FPDS as well as USASpending.gov.

"USAspending.gov is the publicly accessible, searchable website mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 to give the American public access to information on how their tax dollars are spent." In addition to the procurement contract data from FPDS, USASpending includes grants and loans.

Project led by Steven Ballmer to provide a detailed description of federal, state, and local government revenue and spending categorized according to 4 broad constitutionally expressed purposes with associated data on outcomes. All data comes from official sources; generally 1980–present. Also includes the current year data in a detailed 10-K style report.