Center for Social Research

Follow the Money: Mapping Campaign Contributions

What:		Social Science Division Symposium
When:		Tuesday, November 14 @ 3:30PM
Where:		DeVos Communication Center room 170
Who:		All social science faculty, with other faculty and students welcome.
Speaker:		Neil Carlson, Assistant Director of the Center for Social Research
Topic:		Following the money: mapping flows of campaign contributions.

The figure below draws on 2004 data including presidential campaigns, mapping interstate flows for 48 states. Most Republican funds propagated indirectly through Washington DC, which is not mapped in this case, though such mapping is feasible. The map was produced by Waldo Tobler's Flow Mapper tool.

This presentation wll build on skills and a database developed through the CSISS SPACE workshop at UCSB in August, updated with recent FEC data for the 2006 campaign.

Campaign contributions are both a worthy substantive topic and an ideal context for demonstrating more general spatial analysis strategies. Free data from the Federal Election Commission can readily be “geocoded” to a number of levels of analysis. The data has relevance for all social science disciplines and offers an opportunity for classroom integration of spatial analysis in politics (campaign strategy), economics (incentive structures), sociology (wealth and policy influence) and psychology (the public donor personality). The presentation will be brief (15-20 minutes), leaving ample time for questions and discussion of the topic and spatial analysis in social science generally.

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