This repository contains code and data to reproduce the findings featured in our story "The Little-Known Data Broker Industry Is Spending Big Bucks Lobbying Congress."
We used California and Vermont's data broker databases to identify company names.
We compared the data broker company names to client names listed in the Senate's Lobbying Disclosure Act Database. We looked at 2020 filings received from Q1 2020 through Q1 2021.
A copy of both the California and Vermont tables are included in this repository in the data/brokers folder.
We used The Center for Responsive Politics' approach to calculate total spending amounts.
To identify bills, we used regular expression to pull bill numbers from filings' issue descriptions and searched for the titles in the U.S. Congress legislation database.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
filing_id |
The filing ID |
url |
A link to the filing on the U.S. Senate's website |
parent_company |
The parent company, if a company is a subsidiary of a larger company |
company |
The company name |
client_name |
The company name as it appears in the filing |
lobbying_firm |
The lobbying firm as it appears in the filing |
is_self_filer |
TRUE or FALSE depending on whether the "Self" box is checked in the "Client" section of the filing |
type |
What kind of report the filing is, according the filing itself |
period |
The reporting period, according to the filing itself |
spending |
The estimated dollar amount spent, according to the filing |
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