Calculating firms' direct contributions

[Amol Raswan]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to compute the "direct" contributions made by S&P500 corporations, including donations to the outside spending groups (such as super PACs). These are the donations that companies make, distinct from their employees and company PACs. I computed them using the individual contributions data by restricting the data to wherever the contribid is blank and then using the orgname (and ultorg) field to sum up the donations at the company level (and a bit more cleaning that's not relevant here)

I am not sure if this was correct. I'd really appreciate it if someone could help me with a few questions:

1. Am I right that such donations are recorded in the invididual contributions data? Is there another dataset I should look at?

2. I plotted the yearly values of the contributions. Please see the attached plot. The dip in 2020 compared to 2016 is stark. I tried to check if it was right by checking for a few companies that donated in 2016 but not in 2020; it seems right for at least the few companies I checked. But it could be that I am missing something here. I'd appreciate any comments/suggestions on what might be going wrong in my data cleaning/wrangling or whether the graph is actually right...

Thank you,

Amol

PS: I looked at the list of big corporate donors (>$5000) to outside spending groups at this link. I randomly picked a few companies in this list (and which also are in SP500) and my cleaned data also has them. Again, I did not do go through every company in the list and anyway, the list doesn't have all donors. There's no corresponding list for 2016, so I cannot verify if I am overstating the donations in 2016...