3.6-times as many former congressional staffers turned health care lobbyists and their immediate connections have network ties closer to former President Bush, than to current President Obama.
The connections in the network map shown below, and used for the analysis above, include people and organizations (e.g. corporate, not-for-profit, public, etc.) the people have been identified with.
Other trivia: Continue reading “Health Care Leans Republican”
Thanks to ProPublica and Sunlight Foundation:
…for the first time digitized one year’s worth of FARA records, making them accessible in a searchable database that allows users to easily follow the money and connect the dots. With the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker , anyone can quickly learn what governments are lobbying whom, how often and about what. [source @ ProPublica]
Here are the firms the Congressmen and -women from my home state have been meeting with:
and the countries of the governmental department or foreign firm paying the lobbyists:
Thanks everyone for showing the strong interest in the Lobbyist map. I got a couple nice mentions at Mother Jones and LittleSis.org, but more importantly, I’ve added in all of the other names in the map.
Circles are people, squares are organizations, and white circles are the lobbyists in question.
If you’d rather the image than the flash bits, here you go, all 2.5MB of it.
A zoomable version of the earlier map is here:
[Thanks to Drew Conway for the Sea Dragon zoomable suggestion]
The Huffington Post, along with public contributors, has been collecting a list of former Congressional staffers turned healthcare lobbyists. LittleSis.org has been keeping track of these former staffers, and thanks to their API, we now have a social graph of their relationships.
Former staffers in white (with names), and the rest of the visual field to show that some are MUCH better networked than others.
If there’s interest, I can add the names of the people they are networked with and start some analysis of the group.
As always, click for a larger image.
Update: network map with all names, and in a zoomable widget here.
Late last month, the NY Times had an article about the debate over healthcare legislation taking place in the Senate Finance Committee. Coincidentally, around that time, the folks over at LittleSis, the “free database detailing the connections between powerful people and organizations,” were kind enough to give me early access to their API (thanks Kevin and Matthew!).
So from NY Times:
To LittleSis:
Of the named members in the photo, neither Tom Barthold nor Phil Ellis existed at the time in the LittleSis database, but it’s still showing a pretty networked bunch.
I’d like to see someone do this one better, and include donors.
I wanted to put out what’s been done so far on making yesterday’s post more interactive. There’s an awful lot that could be better about this map. Particularly legibility of labels in the core (it’s just too dense). If you want to see names, I suggest looking at the edges of the map.
Michael Bommarito is looking into better layouts for legibility. And while you are waiting, I suggest getting your fill of everything he’s ever written.
The data was collected from OpenSecrets.org.
[21-Apr-2009: You should see a flash image above, but am having an awful time getting this to render on a Mac. Works great on Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).]
OpenSecrets.org is offering free access to their collected data about political contributions, and in that vein, I’ve created a network of expenditures by 527’s*. I am looking for a way to make this more detailed for your ease of exploration, so please stay tuned.
*Groups whose primary purpose is to influence elections are exempt from taxation under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code. From NP Action.
Digging around the “archives” I found this image I created of the interrelations of NY residents contributing in the 2007-2008 election cycle.
