LobbyView

LobbyView is a comprehensive database of money in politics, describing the universe of U.S. federal lobbying and campaign donations from 1999 to the present at the level of firms, politicians, and individual donors.
 
LobbyView project involves developing novel computational methods to automatically collect, process, disambiguate, merge, and update the database after parsing more than 75 million lobbying reports and campaign contribution filings. This creates more than 100 quadrillion combinations of observations across lobbying-electoral-legislative activities, allowing researchers to investigate who is politically active and whose interests are reflected in the U.S. policy-making. The database will deepen our understanding of the mechanisms through which unequal access to legislative and electoral political institutions may aggravate social and economic inequalities in the U.S.
 
To broaden dissemination and enhance scientific research, the LobbyView team is also developing a web-interface via www.LobbyView.org facilitating public access to these substantial empirical resources.
 
This project is supported by the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and MIT.