This week we ran a story by the esteemed Brendan Greeley on the American Legislative Exchange Council. Brendan’s piece focuses on state legislation that makes it difficult for municipalities (especially in rural areas) to wire homes for broadband. While reporting he’d been in touch with the fine folks at the Sunlight Foundation and suggested there might be a graphic lurking in a pile of data he’d received from them. That data included campaign contributions (for election cycles dating to 2000) to the primary sponsors of legislation that make municipal broadband difficult.
Immediately, we wondered if there was a correlation between donations from incumbent internet providers (including cable and telephone providers) and sponsors of bills benefiting them. To make the task more manageable we decided to focus our efforts on North Carolina, since they had recently passed legislation favorable to incumbent internet providers after four attempts.
First, I needed to find a way to separate donations from internet provider incumbents and everyone else. This was simply a matter of finding providers in North Carolina while keeping in mind that considerable industry consolidation has occurred in the last ten years. Next, I had to consolidate candidates listed with varying names but refer to the same candidate (Bob, Robert). This is tedious and time-consuming, so deciding to use Google Refine was the best decision I could have made.
After reimporting the data from Google Refine to Excel and creating a pivot table, we were able to conclude that donations do vary by candidate and from cycle to cycle. This was compelling especially when compared to the point that each candidate sponsored legislation benefiting these same donors. However, there was one more aspect we needed to examine. Do these candidates receive MORE money than their peers OR do these donors give inconsistent sums to everyone? With this in mind, we reached back out to the Sunlight Foundation and had them pull all the donations from our list of internet provider incumbents and to ANY candidate. After comparing their donations to all candidates, it’s clear that they in most cases gave much more money to candidates who sponsored legislation securing their incumbency. With that, we felt comfortable the graphic conveyed an interesting and tangible point.
-kp
