Calculating corporate contribution totals

[Dan Vegeto]

Hello,

I'm a grad student at the Columbia School of Journalism, and I'm trying to use OpenSecrets bulk data for a story I'm working on about corporate political influence. I've tried doing a manual search of the bulk data for individual contributions to calculate the total contributions for a given company (filtering by organization name or employer), but my totals don't seem to match up to what is shown on the OpenSecrets summary page. Could someone please explain the methodology that is used for calculating the totals for a corporation from the bulk data?

Thanks,

Dan Vegeto

[Susi Alger]

Hello Dan,

To create the data we have in the organization profiles, you would have to use the indivs, pacs and pac_other tables.  When combining this data, it's important to read the information in the Users Guide about criteria to set to avoid double counting some of the contributions. Additionally, we would be including data for affiliates in parent organization profiles.  For example, AT&T's profile includes contributions attributed to Ameritech Corp.   I'd be happy to talk with you more about this off line.

Best,

Susi

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[shiwani varal]

Hi all,

I realise that this thread was started a long time ago, but I am attempting to do something similar for my PhD project. I am creating a database for all the corporate political contributions by S&P500 firms. So far, I have downloaded the data for individuals, PAC and PAC others in my database, but I am not sure how to combines these contributions. I would be very grateful if I could get some ideas on this. Thank you so so much!

Kind regards,

Shiwani

[Jesus Salas]

You have to do it manually, using ult_org or the PAC name and comparing that to the company names in CRSP or Compustat. I am doing that now for the 2016 cycle and I would be willing to exchange for other years... say 2018 if someone is willing to hand merge and get Gvkeys for that year.

Jesus Salas 

On Mar 4, 2020, at 12:43 PM, shiwani varal <varal....@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Dan Vegeto]

Hi Shiwani,

It's great to get some interest in my past work, yes it's been a long time. I don't know if I'll be able to help you but you can take a look at some of my code on GitHub here: https://github.com/danvegeto/thesis . I'd imagine the python scripts for scraping the data (in the "collection" folder) would be of most interest to you. If you have questions I can try to point you in the right direction.

Best,

Dan

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[shiwani varal]

Hi Dan and Jesus,

Thank you to you both for sharing the information. It looks like I might need more time to do that than I can afford, so I am thinking of using only individual contribution data and change my direction a little bit. Thank you to you both!

On Tuesday, November 19, 2013 at 1:32:10 AM UTC, Dan Vegeto wrote:

[J S]

Hi everyone,

I'm a PhD student doing a similar study. Can someone explain to me how to avoid the double counting that Susi was writing to Dan about in the early posts above? Also, Dan--if you're reading this, can I ask you for some guidance with your Python scripts? I don't have a computer science background and am very much a novice at Python. I see that you have quite a few Python programs in your Collection folder. Would I need to use all of them or just certain ones? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

J.J. Singh

[ying zhao]

Dear all,

I am also trying to merge the Campaign Finance Data (PAC data) with the Compustat data at the firm level. I would appreciate it if you could share any information that would be helpful, and I also welcome potential cooperation or a deal.

Thanks!!

Best regards,
Rebecca Zhao