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Power to the People: New Web Database Allows You to Make Connections Between Money and Politics in California
By Frank D. Russo
This is just the beginning, but you can now research in a few clicks of a mouse, the connection between money and politics in California on a number of levels--from an individual bill, by an individual legislator, and up to the more general patterns of money contributed by "special interests" and other groups and the fate of legislation in general. Much of what used to take hours to dig up and analyze is now laid bare for you to see and use in seconds or minutes.
The new MAPLight.org website combines information from the Official California Legislative Information website, which contains the official text of each bill and how each legislator voted, and the Institute on Money in State Politics, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to accurate, comprehensive and unbiased documentation and research on campaign finance.
Take a Video Tour from Maplight.org to learn all about this tool in just 6 minutes, and you'll see what I mean. It is the E ticket ride for anyone who wants more answers about California politics and public policy. It will revolutionize the way that journalists and average citizens report and research politics. I can hear the footsteps of campaign sleuths and others already trying to see what they can dig up.
MAPLight.org allows anyone to answer questions such as:
• How did a legislator vote on a particular bill, and who are the top contributors to that legislator?
• How often did legislators vote to support bills their top contributors supported?
• How often did special interests (such as insurance companies or drug companies) succeed in blocking bills that did not serve their interests?
Information is available through the end of the 2003-2004 legislative session. Data from the latest session ending in August will not be processed for a few months. Plans are to expand this nationally to Congress and other state legislatures.
The MAPLight.org database contains 5,000 Senate and Assembly bills, $219 million in campaign contributions (that will have to be updated!) and 6 million database cells. It took 22 student research interns 16 months to prepare, but now that the template is in place, future information will be made available with increasing speed.
I spoke with Dan Newman, the head of this group, and he told me that once the data is in from this year's session, they will move to the 2007 session about to begin, and then get a 24 hour turnaround time of data.
According to Newman: “MAPLight.org is extremely flexible and easy to use.You can approach your research in the way that is most interesting to you. You can browse through legislation either by the subject area or bill number that concerns you. Or you can start by looking at the special interests, or at the voting records. Soon we will have ‘real time’ XML feeds and widgets for blogs and desktops.”
MAPLight.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in Berkeley, California. It used to be called "Take Back California." The name change coincides with the release of their new tool and plans to "go national." This revolution is starting in California.
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