Introduction

1.1 The purpose of this document is to analyze data from the FEC website and illustrate how Cincinnati money influences politics.

1.2 The data is a subset of all Cincinnati data from 2015-present, reported on the FEC website in tabular form on this page: https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/. The subset includes only contributions where a political party is affiliated with the committee receiving the contribution. This means all non-affiliated super PAC committees are not included in this data.

1.3 This report will assist the individual to better understand how money from Cincinnati influences politics through the usage of summary statistics and the presentation of the data in a more visual format that includes summary statistics, interactive tables, charts, and some simple analytics.

Packages Required

Package Purpose
tidyverse Core packages for data analysis and manipulation
lubridate For parsing date-time data
knitr General-purpose literate program engine for output control
readr For importing cSV data rectangular data
scales For transforming and rescaling data
stats For creating interactive tables
skimr For general summary statistics about data set
prettydoc Creating documents in R Markdown
car Companion to applied regression analysis
ggcharts Creating common chart type visualizations
DT Rendering of HTML tables
gridExtra Provides miscellaneous functions for grids
kableExtra for table placement in html

Data Preparation

The following data cleaning tasks were performed:

Source Data Explanation

The data includes the following variables:

  • Contributor Name (first and last)
  • Contributor Street Address
  • Contributor Employer and Occupation
  • Date of Contribution
  • Contribution Amount (The amount contributed in this specific instance of a contribution being made. Positive values reflect a donation whereas negative values reflect a refund of a previous donation)
  • Contributor Aggregate YTD (The total amount of contributions made year-to-date by this individual contributor)
  • Committee Name (Name of the political committee receiving the contribution)
  • Committee Type (Presidential, senate, house, party or political action committee)
  • Committee Party Affiliation
  • Qualification (Whether the committee type is Qualified or Nonqualified)

In the dataset, there are 57351 observations.

The number of missing values that have been recoded as “UNKNOWN” are:

  • Contributor’s Employer: 9189

  • Contributor’s Occouptaion: 1570

The following fields have missing values:

  • Missing 6 for contributor’s Last name.
  • Missing 17 for contributor’s street name.

Summary Information

The net total contribution receipt amount is $20,342,540. The average contribution amount is $355. The median contribution amount is $50. This would tend to indicate there is right skewness in the contribution amounts.

Viewing the variance in contribution amounts by year, the boxplots clearly illustrate the skewness in the amounts given from 2015 to 2019 by the significant presence of outliers.

When segregating the annual contribution amount data, it becomes more apparent that the skewness observed coud primarily be attributed to the significant degree of variance in Party donations.

The below table displays the amounts given by Party Affiliation
Committee Party Affiliaton Amount (in $s)
REPUBLICAN PARTY 10,905,706
DEMOCRATIC PARTY 9,372,506
INDEPENDENT 23,386
DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR 21,237
LIBERTARIAN PARTY 12,027
GREEN PARTY 7,677

The Republican party committees have slighly outraised their Democratic party counterparts since 2015. The other parties are substantially behind in fundraising during the same period.

Interactive Table

A random sample of 2000 observations were taken from the primary data for the interactive table below. Individual columns can be sorted ascending or desending using the arrows to the right of the heading. A drop down box is provided to select the number of entries to be displayed per page. There is an area below the column hedings for filtering the data. Additionally, there is a navigation bar below the table to view other pages. A search box is included for searching for specific terms. The first name and street address columns have been removed for privacy.

Directed Analysis

Which Cincinnati residents spend the most money on politics? Where does it go?

As indicated in the bar chart above, Mr. Rosenthall is the top contributor from the Cincinnati region since 2015 with $772,720 spent. He is followed by Robert Castellini, with $494,900 and Susan Castellini, with $368,600.

Where are the funds going?

The Party committee type receives the most funds from Cincinnati residents with $8,625,001. This group is followed by House and then Senate with $5,406,700 and $3,648,605, respectively. PAC trails all committee types with $99,639 in contributions received.

Who has made the most individual contributions? What do you think is going on here?

As indicated in the visual above, Ruchhoft made 455 individual party contributions, followed closely with 429 to House committee types. Alternatively, we can view this in terms of amount spent for each committee type as pictured below.

committee_party_affiliation Count Amount
DEMOCRATIC PARTY 1290 43471

Given that all the individual contributions has been earmarked for the Democratic party, it is conceivable that the contributor belongs to the Democratic party.

Which employers are heavily represented in the data?

There are a couple of ways to determine what constitutes being ‘heavily represented’. Based on the amount of money spent in contributions by employer, retired individuals could be considered the most heavilly represented followed by the unemployed with $2,472,895 and $2,298,257, respectively.

If we were to view this as being based on the total number of individual contributions, individuals who are self-described as being unemployed, followed closely by those individuals that did not identify an employer and retired people could be considered the most heavily represented with 10,928, 9,189, and 9,186, respectively.

Excluding individuals that are unemployed, retired, self-employed, homemakers or employer status unknown, we get the following display

The University of Cincinnati and Children’s Hospital are first and second with $1375 and $400, respectively. Xavier University(highlighted) ranks 4th.

How many individuals working for Xavier have made at least one contribution?

Employee Instances Total Amount(in $s)
TRAUB, GEORGE W 70 632
TRAUB, GEORGE 28 223
HOLLAND, MARTHA 10 1,350
JOHNSON, ELIZABETH 6 537
LEVYA-GARDNER, BRENDA 4 250
TOWNSEND, ROBERT 4 196
JACK, DARCY 3 404
SCHULTZ, JANET 3 250
TOEPKER, TERRY 3 600
TRACEY, ANN 3 1,750 
## # A tibble: 57,351 x 12
##    contributor_las~ contributor_fir~ contributor_str~ contributor_emp~
##    <chr>            <chr>            <chr>            <chr>           
##  1 LIRA             MONICA           3230 LONGMEADOW~ UNKNOWN         
##  2 WILMES           JOHN             4215 DELANEY ST  SELF-EMPLOYED   
##  3 JAPIKSE          CORNELIS         2507 EVERGREEN ~ RETIRED         
##  4 HILL             THOMAS           2811 QUEENSWOOD~ ACOSTA SALES AN~
##  5 DAVIS            MICHAEL          7321 CLOUGH PIKE SELF-EMPLOYED   
##  6 KUES             EILEEN           573 EVANSWOOD PL UNEMPLOYED      
##  7 LIRA             MONICA           3230 LONGMEADOW~ LIBRARY OF CONG~
##  8 ROSENTHAL BERLI~ JENNIE           1846 KEYS CRESC~ SELF-EMPLOYED   
##  9 ROSENTHAL BERLI~ JENNIE           1846 KEYS CRESC~ SELF-EMPLOYED   
## 10 PEPPER           FRANCES          233 OLIVER RD.   UNEMPLOYED      
## # ... with 57,341 more rows, and 8 more variables:
## #   contributor_occupation <chr>, contribution_receipt_date <date>,
## #   contribution_receipt_amount <dbl>, committee_name <chr>,
## #   committee_type <chr>, qualification <chr>,
## #   committee_party_affiliation <chr>, fullName <chr>

There are a total of 23 distinct contributors associated with Xavier University who have given a combined 1.122410^{4} dollars to various committee types.

The table above lists the top 5 individuals by total number of individual contributions. The associated total amounts given are reported on the respective bars. It appears that George W. Traub has made the most individual contributions with 70 for a cumulative sum of $632. Here, we see that Martha Holland has made the most individual contributions with 10 for a cumulative amount of $1,350.

Self-Directed Analysis

Comparison of Amounts Contributed and Refunded

Refunds RefundPercent Contributions ContributionPercent RefundSum ContributionSum
501 0.0087 56850 0.9913 -715648.1 21058188

As exhibited in the table above, there have been 501 refunds issued, totaling approximately $715,650. Although this amount represents less than 1% of the overall contribution total, further scrutiny is warranted.

Viewing the same data by year of refund, we see that significantly larger refunds were issued in 2015 and 2018 as compared to all other years in the study.

Finding the top 10 refunds by listed employer generates the below chart. Interestingly, those that identify as being unemployed top the chart in refunds with $131,666. This group is followed by those individuals that have reported being self-employed and then those that did not indicate employer.

Excluding those individuals that are self-reported as being unemployed, self-employed, homemaker, or unknown, the table below displays the top refund amounts by listed companies.

Who is taking more than giving?

Sporty Pilot Shop, AK Steel Corp, and Michelman, Inc. appear to have received refunds of an amount greater than their contributions, over the selected periods.

Who is your daddy?

In this final self-directed analysis, I would like to know which individuals are substially contributing to republican party committees, democratic party committees.

I intend to answer this question by grouping the data by party affiliation, and then filtering out those which are not Republican or Demecratic Party. Next, I will get a cumulative sum of net contributions by each individual. Finally, I will select the top 10 donors to each party and graph the results using a cumulative chart, followed by a totals segregated by year.

Now that we have taken a look at how much is being spent, by who, and to which races and parties, who are the big spenders for each party? Lets first take a look at the top contributors to each party

Overall, Robert Castellini has contributed the most to the Republican party since 2015, Frances Pepper has led for the Democrats.

As for the annual breakdowns,

Notice that the cumulative leaders are not neccessarily leading in each and every year.

Contributors

Professor J. Assay. Williams College of Business, Xavier University. (2020).