Cincinnati Money in Politics
Mike Swofford
10/22/2019
Overview
With the political climate in the Cincinnati area in constant shift, some insight into changes over time can be gleaned from the impact of money in politics. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports all contributions to politically affiliated organizations.
Using the data available on contributions since 2015, this document will serve to analyze and visualize trends and insights correlated to Cincinnati money in politics. Following an explanation of the data used and the process used to clean, standardize, and manipulate the data, summary statistics, interactive tables, and analytics graphs will highlight some of the insights discovered.
Tools Used
Packages
This analysis was developed in R and utlized the following packages:
| Package | Description |
|---|---|
| expss | Collection of SPSS statistics spreadsheet-like functions |
| DT | For rendering HTML data tables |
| lubridate | For date-time manipulation |
| naniar | A package for reaplacing values with NA |
| tidyverse | Collection of packages for data manipulation, exploration, and visualization |
| scales | Provides for formatting of graph axes labels |
| stringr | For manipulation of strings and characters |
Data
All data for this analaysis was publicly reported by the FEC, which can be viewed and exported from https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/. For the purposes of this analysis, a subset of this data including contributions from 2015 to present that were made to a committee affiliated with a political party.
This dataset includes records for every contibution with the following information for each:- Contibutor:
- First and last name
- Street address
- Employer
- Occupation
- Aggregate year-to-date contibutions
- Contribution:
- Receipt date
- Receipt amount
- Committee
- Name
- Type
- Party affiliation
Before cleaning and preparation for analysis, this dataset included 57375 records.
Cleaning
The steps used to clean, unify, and standardize the dataset included:
- Unifying all employer data to a single “NA” value where other tags were used. This included replacing values where the record was noted as “not employed” or similar circumstance.
- Unifying all occupation data to a single “NA” value where other tags were used. Similarly, where a contributor was noted as “not employed,” the occupation was set to “NA.”
- Unifying all data where a contributor was noted as retired. If the employer information was noted as “retired,” this was set to “NA” and the occupation was set to “Retired.” Likewise, if the occupation of the contributor was noted as retired, any employer information for that record was set to “NA” (a retiree does not have an employer).
- Unifying all data where a contributor was noted as self-employed. A variety of different descriptions were used in the original data, all replaced to be “Self-employed.” Where an occupation was noted as self-employed, any employer information was set to “Self-employed.”
- Standardize the format for contribution dates, and removed any records that were outside of the range of this analysis, i.e. before 2015. This resulted in the removal of 12 records.
- Removed records that had a $0 contribution. These records signify that no money was contributed or refunded and will have no impact on the analysis. This resulted in the removal of 12 records.
- Flagged the receiving committee of each contributor as “qualified” or “unqualified.”
- Simplified the types of committees to 5 categories: House, Senate, Presedential, Party, and PAC.
After cleaning, the final prepared dataset included 57351, inlcuding 11059 unique contributors. Of those records, 56850 were contributions and 501 were refunds.
Data Table
Below can be seen the final dataset that was used. This table can be searched and filtered as desired.
Contributors to Political Committees, 2015-Present
Summary of Variables
The following variables were used for the analysis and visualizations of the data. This summary describes the total number of records for each variable (or the number of distinct variables where appropriate), and a minimum, maximum, and mean of varaibles where appropriate.
| Variable | Total (unique) | Min (least) | Max (most) | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contributor_employer | 3774 | (many) | SELF-EMPLOYED | - |
| Contributor_occupation | 1890 | (many) | RETIRED | - |
| Contribution_receipt_date | - | 2015-01-05 | 2019-08-31 | 2017-06-05 |
| Contribution_receipt_amount | $20,342,540 | ($30,700) | $66,100 | $354.70 |
| Committee_name | 638 | (21ST CENTURY DEMOCRATS(many) | HILLARY FOR AMERICA | - |
| Committee_type | 5 | PAC | Party | - |
| Committee_party_affiliation | 5 | GREEN PARTY | DEMOCRATIC PARTY | - |
| Qualified (true) | 56903 | - | - | - |
Analysis
Using the organized data of contributors and contributions amounts, analysis and visualization bring to light a variety of trends and insights into the ever-shifting political environment in the Cincinnati area.
Political Contribution Total over Time
From this graph, the changes in the total contribution amounts from year to year reveal the impact of major election years on contributions. The 2016 presidential election was the most contributed year of this range, closely followed by the 2018 mideterm elections.
Also notable is the decline in total contributions in off years, although 2019 data is not yet complete.
Political Contributions by Party
For the election cycles of 2015-2016 and 2017-2018, while the overall contributions were down for the latter cycle, contributions to the Democratic Party were nearly flat from the previous presidential cycle and eclipsed Republican Party contributions. For the minor parties, contributions descreased overall, with independents maintaining the closest amount to the previous cycle.
Types of Political Contributions
Contributions to a party committee are significantly higher than any other type. Interestingly, while the contributions to party committees by Republicans is much higher than Democrats, contributions to Presedential committees by Democrats is much higher than Republicans. This is despite the loss of the 2016 election by Democrats.
Greatest Contributors
The largest contributors and how the money is used can be viewed in multiple ways. A look at the top ten contributors in the Cincinnati area shows a repeat of several names.
The first view is of the top ten contributors based on political party affiliated with the committee or committees receiving donations from that contributor.
Top 10 Contributors to a Party, 2015-Present
Next, a list of the top ten contributors to a single committee. The total figures are aggregates of all contributions by that contributor to that party over the time period.
Top 10 Contributors to a Committee, 2015-Present
Finally, a top ten list of the largest single gifts to a committee.
Top 10 Largest Contributions
Most Individual Contributions
From the 11059 unique contributors and 56850 positive contributions, the contributor with the most number of individual gifts was Ann Ruchhoft with 1239 gifts.
As Ann Ruchhoft does not show on any of the top contribution lists, this seems like an extreme quantity of contributions. What is going on here?
A look at some of the committees may help give some explanation:
Most Frequent Contributor Top Committees
With a total of $39327.20 given, the average contribution amount was $31.74. What might be gathered from this scenario is that Ann Rushholt is a Democratic Party supporter of congressional candidates, with the small average of individual contributions indicating payments are made through a regular process such as employer payroll deduction.
Employer Representation
These employers of Cincinnati residents represent the largest contributors to politics in total dollars:
To be represent the top companies in this graph, self-employed contributors were removed from the calculations.
Xavier University Employee Contributions
Employees of Xavier University contributed a total of $10574.47 to political committees.
The following is a list of all employees of Xavier University that have made at least one political contributions between 2015 and 2019, in descending order of the total amount contributed:
Xavier University Employee Contributors
Contribution Refunds
Political campaigns and committees may refund contributions for a number of reasons. An exploration of the data that includes refunds can provide some insight into the circumstances or causes for refunds to occur.
First, by looking at the total of refunds for each year as they relate to the political parties shows some trend that can be inferred from the election cycles:
It should first be noted that only the Democratic and Republican parties are represented here. Apparently the smaller parties did not provide any refunds during the time period.
It could be inferred that the amount of refunds relates to the overal political climate for the years of the election cycles. While not required, many refunds are given when a losing campaign has leftover funds.
For the 2015 and 2016 years, refunds from Democratic committees were higher than Republican ones; this is in line with the greater wins of Republican candidates in that cycle.
Similarly, beginning in 2018, Republican committees provided more refunds, which correlates to the increase in wins of Democratic candidates.
Exploratory Analysis: Change in Proportions of Party Contributors over Time
An intersting analysis of this data would be to compare the number of unique contributors over time. As the political climate has become more polarized and the actions of parties in power of the branches of government, it may follow that contributors to one party may decrease while another increases.
Question: Do the number of unique donors to the Republican and Democratic Party committees increase or decrease proprotionally over time?
This analysis will be done by:- Identifying unique contributors (again based on the assumption that a record with the same first name, last name, and street address is a unique contributor)
- Grouping unique contributors by the party associated with the committee contributed too.
- Plotting the number of contributors by party across each year of data as a percentage of total contributors.
Note that since the amount of data for the minor political parties is small in comparison to the Democratic and Republican parties, this analysis will only look at the two major parties.
Looking at the percentage of contributors for each Party over time, the general trend across all years is a decrease. This makes sense, as discussed before, in non-presedential years, contributions would likely decrease. However, what is more telling is the comparison of the differences between each party each year.
From 2015 to 2016, the percentage of contributors increase nearly 21% for the Democratic Party, while it only increased 8% for the Republican Party. The Democrats lost many elections in 2016, including the Presidential election and the majority of the Senate. That following year, the percentage of Democrat contributors increase from 8% to 22% or a 16% increase, while Republican contributors only increased from 3% to 8%, or a 5% increase.
What does this mean? While it is impossible to tell from the data how much change over time can be contributed to the types of elections being held (presidential, congressional, etc.), if that were the only factor, it would imply that any increase or decrease should be similar between the two parties. Instead, with a major increase in the Democratic contributors and a minor increase in Republican contributors (16% vs. 5%), there must be more to the story. Two possibilities are that Republicans are less engaged following the wins of their Party, or Democrats are more engaged following the losses of their Party.