Briefly, what is MAPLight.org?
MAPLight.org is a groundbreaking web site that brings together all campaign contributions given to legislators with how every legislator votes on a given bill. We illuminate the connections between money and politics, providing unprecedented information to enable advocacy groups and citizens to hold legislators accountable. The “MAP” in MAPLight.org stands for “Money And Politics.” For a 6-minute overview of the site, see our Video Tour [1].
Where did the idea that became MAPLight.org originate?
As a political volunteer, I was frustrated with the uphill battle that issue-oriented nonprofits and community groups fight against big-money special-interests. I saw the tremendous influence of campaign contributions on government, but when I explained these connections to others who did not yet see them, the examples were not good enough and there was too much hand-waving. I decided to build a website that illuminates the specific connections between campaign money and the specific issues people care about.
Tell us how MAPLight.org works, in simple technical terms.
MAPLight.org combines data from the Center for Responsive Politics, the National Institute on Money in State Politics, the U.S. Congress and California official legislative web sites, and from public hearings and news databases. Our technical challenges include integrating these disparate data sources and improving the efficiency of our research team, which researches the groups that support and oppose each bill in the U.S. Congress and in California.
The new “Add-in Organization” feature on our site lets anyone bring to our attention a group that has come out in support of or opposition to a bill in Congress. Our research staff validates all submissions and adds them to our database only if proven accurate. If you know who supports or opposes a particular bill, find that bill on MAPLight.org and click “Add an Organization” to send us a note!
Who uses MAPLight.org and why? Do you have many nonprofits using the service?
I designed MAPLight.org specifically to help issue-oriented nonprofits—those who advocate on any issue. For example, a small environmental nonprofit in California cited MAPLight.org’s data as part of a newspaper editorial opposing a quarry in their community. A health-related nonprofit could find on MAPLight.org [2] that drug companies gave an average of $70,000 to each U.S. Senator who voted against the bill that would have allowed Americans to purchase prescription drugs from Canada. The drug companies gave an average of just $26,000 to Senators who voted the other way. Nonprofits can use facts like this in their communications to better educate members on the issues that they care about.
It would take days or weeks of work to manually generate the money/vote correlations that MAPLight.org generates with the click of a mouse. We are a free resource for nonprofits, providing facts to make their issue-oriented advocacy more compelling and effective, across all issues.
You will be opening your API later this year. How do you see this changing the way people interact with the data MAPLight.org has aggregated?
In just a few months we will launch “widgets” so that any nonprofit group can include our money/votes data on their web site for free, about any bill or issue they choose. To learn when we launch this exciting free feature, sign up on our site [3].
What other changes do you have in the pipeline? Where do you see MAPLight.org going?
We currently track money in politics for U.S. Congress and for the California legislature. We will expand to cover all 50 states, with New York State next. We are seeking talented volunteer programmers to help us capture data from all 50 state legislature web sites. If you can help, please contact us [4].
Your site is, by its very nature, nonpartisan, in that you let the data speak for itself, but MAPLight.org displays information that could be damaging to some peoples’ political careers. Have you received any hate mail?
No. All the information we publish is already in the public record. We combine it in innovative ways and make it broadly available to everyone. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote over a century ago, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
Why do you do what you do? Why do you, personally, think technology like MAPLight.org is important for social change?
Nonprofits advocating for change on any issue have the deck stacked against them, as long as special-interest campaign donors continue to distort public policy. Trying to counter monied interests in our current money-dominated political system is like trying to run up a wall. It is my hope that MAPLight.org will enable nonprofits and their members to take a step back and realize that none of us can accomplish our goals without first joining together to achieve systemic money and politics reform.
Dan Newman
Executive Director and Co-Founder, MAPLight.org