Abstract
The past decade has seen an increase in public attention on the role of campaign donations and outside spending. This has led some donors to seek ways of skirting disclosure requirements, such as by contributing through nonprofits that allow for greater privacy. These nonprofits nonetheless clearly aim to influence policy discussions and have a direct impact, in some cases, on electoral outcomes. We develop a technique for identifying nonprofits engaged in political activity that relies not on their formal disclosure, which is often understated or omitted, but on text analysis of their websites. We generate political activity scores for 339,818 organizations and validate our measure through crowdsourcing. Using our measure, we characterize the number and distribution of political nonprofits and estimate how much these groups spend for political purposes.
- Copyright © 2016 by Russell Sage Foundation. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Reproduction by the United States Government in whole or in part is permitted for any purpose. The authors would like to thank the participants in the Russell Sage Foundation “Big Data in Political Economy” conference and two anonymous reviewers for their comments. This research was made possible by funding support from the New York University George Downs Prize. Direct correspondence to: Drew Dimmery at drew{at}drewdimmery.com, Department of Politics, Second Floor, 19 W 4th St., New York, NY 10012; and Andrew Peterson at ajp502{at}nyu.edu, Department of Politics, Second Floor, 19 W 4th St., New York, NY 10012.
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