CFI Press Releases > CFI’s Groundbreaking Database Of State Campaign Finance Laws

The New Tool is Downloadable, Interactive, and Free CFI’s Historical Database of State Campaign Finance Laws tool What are the laws in my state? When did they change? Which states disclose what kinds of information about independent spending? Which ones changed their contribution limits after Citizens United? In rank order, which states had higher and lower disclosure thresholds (or contribution limits, etc.) in any given year? visualization tool What difference does it make to have higher or lower limits? Is the law really responsible for a particular effect – whether positive or negative? visualizations Seemant Kulleen reportsymposium of peer-reviewed articles PRACTICAL AND OBJECTIVE RESEARCH FOR DEMOCRACY The Campaign Finance Institute is the nation's pre-eminent think tank for objective, non-partisan research on money in politics in U.S. federal and state elections. CFI's original work is published in scholarly journals as well as in forms regularly used by the media and policy making community. Statements made in its reports do not necessarily reflect the views of CFI's Trustees or financial supporters. The Campaign Finance Institute is pleased to release a groundbreaking new tool, “ CFI’s Historical Database of State Campaign Finance Laws ”. The database covers all of the states’ campaign finance laws every two years since 1996. It is designed for everything from interactive and visualized lookups to downloadable datasets. Anyone with a serious interest in politics is bound to have made, heard, or wondered about claims to the effect that the laws governing money in politics “make a difference”. These claims may be about who runs for office, how they campaign, who wins, how they govern, or what policies come out in the end. But until now it has been impossible to evaluate most of these claims properly. You cannot really understand a law’s effects unless you can compare jurisdictions with different laws to themselves and each other over time. CFI’s new tool opens the door to let everyone make those comparisons. It covers every state since 1996 and is structured to handle queries from the simplest to the most complex. Because not everyone will want to use the tool in the same way, the material comes in two formats. One is a remarkably compact and attractive visualization that will let users look up the answers to what we expect will be their most common questions. For example: All of these kinds of questions can be answered through the visualization tool . But the tool is based on only a fraction of what the data can offer. The full database has literally hundreds of pieces of information for each state and year. The visualization only covers about 10% of these. The full set can be downloaded in whole, or part. It then can be manipulated or merged with other data sets at the user’s pleasure. Downloading is the first step for answering “what difference” questions. For example: To get started, we recommend that the user click one of the links to see the visualizations . That will bring you to our tool, which comes with easy-to-follow instructions. The visualization is informative and it is fun. But because there is so much more, we hope that using the visualization will just whet your appetite. If you want to save the visualized answers for reference (or manipulate them for research) there is a button on each page that will let you download the results of each query. This is in a standard format readily opened in spreadsheets. Another button will do the same for all of the visualized answers at once, while a third will get you to a download page for all or part of the full database. And if you are not sure which data might interest you, just click the link for the codebook to see a description of everything in the full database. And here’s an open invitation to others who like what they see: just let us know, and CFI will be happy to answers any questions and work with you to help make this tool available through your organization’s website. This project has involved nearly four years and 10,000 hours of hard work. We want to take this opportunity to thank those who helped. Leading the effort on CFI’s staff were Brendan Glavin (Systems and Data Manager), Ronda Bybee (Associate Director), Tyler Culberson (Research Analyst), and Michael J. Malbin (Executive Director). The data visualization was conceived and programmed by Curran Kelleher and Seemant Kulleen . The collaboration went far beyond visualization, as our conversations about the underlying logic led to improving the database. Also playing crucial roles were fourteen law students across the country who coded the data: Anthony Bizien, Miles Eckardt, Kaitlin Fallon, Christine Ganley, Ryan Keehn, Douglas Keith, Chris Land, Dustin Lauermann, Molefi McIntosh, Neela Pack, Andrew Pepper-Anderson, Ameena Ross, Antonio Thomas, and Benjamin Wallace. Justin Koch, a Ph.D. student in political science at Georgetown University, helped with early drafts of the codebook. The database was inspired by a task force of scholars convened jointly in 2012-2013 by the Campaign Finance Institute and Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC). That effort led to a report co-authored by BPC’s John Fortier and CFI’s Michael Malbin, together with a symposium of peer-reviewed articles in The Forum by the co-conveners and several of the task force’s members. Creating the database was the task force’s first recommendation because the scholars saw it as a necessary precondition for understanding and sorting out the impact of the changing legal and communications environment. Finally, we would like to thank CFI’s financial supporters, whose enthusiasm helped bring this project to completion. The Democracy Fund (then still part of The Omidyar Network) underwrote the joint CFI-BPC task force. After the task force the CFI database project was sustained by general operating support from The Democracy Fund, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Mertz Gilmore Foundation, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and The Smith Richardson Foundation.