In FigNewtons/electioneer: U.S. Campaign Finance Data and Visualizations

Electioneer

Electioneer is a data visualization system that uses D3.js and data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics to encourage citizens to explore and discover insights about campaign financing in U.S. elections.

The Motivation

The New York Times conducted a poll in 2015 asking Americans about campaign finance and political donations. They found (among other things) that

• 84% believe that money has too much influence in political campaigns
• 75% believe that outside groups (not affiliated with a candidate) should be required to publically disclose their contributors
• 58% believe that both parties equally benefit from money in politics

Indeed, many cite the court rulings in Citizens United vs FEC and Speechnow.org vs FEC as the turning point in the rise of money in politics. The rulings have led to the creation of super PACs and the rise of "dark money" spending in elections. As a result, it has become very difficult to trace the flow of money from individual groups and donors to candidates, let alone intuitively see how this transfer of money may have influenced a candidate's voting record. While there are many investigative pieces about this topic, we believe visualization can point out unseen insights about the campaign finance system and arm citizens with the knowledge needed to better understand the current political process.

Data

License

MIT

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  fig.path = "README-"
)

FigNewtons/electioneer documentation built on May 6, 2019, 5:04 p.m.