New Tool Links Specific Votes To Money Donated To Congress

Want to find out how much money has been donated to members of Congress, and by what company, industry or individual? Want to see how donors feel about specific bills, and how members of Congress voted on those bills? Now you can, with a new search tool provided by MAPLight.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization that illuminates the connection between money and politics. 

The group’s new web-accessible contributions search tool provides detailed information about special-interest contributions given to their elected officials in Congress (and in California). MAPLight.org’s contributions data is provided by the Center for Responsive Politics.
 
MAPLight.org's contributions search tool reveals in detail each campaign contribution given to members of Congress, broken down by contributor, amount, legislator and date. Journalists, bloggers, researchers and citizens can search for campaign finance data by industry, interest group, company, individual donor and more. The search tool is located at http://maplight.org/us-congress/contributions.

For example, the site provides information on H.R. 4173 – the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, showing each senator, how they voted on the financial reform bill, and the amount each received from commercial banks and other interests opposing financial reform. Senator Mitch McConnell received the most. MAPLight.org’s new contributions search tool shows the 291 contributions given to Senator McConnell from the commercial banking industry, which totals $366,875 for the 2002-2010 election cycles. Users can search by company to find that 397 contributions totaling $463,607 were given to members of Congress by Citigroup in the 2010 election cycle. Users can search by interest group to learn that 69,531 contributions totaling $83,101,028 were given to members of Congress by finance, insurance, and real estate interests in the 2010 election cycle.
 
Search results can be sorted and downloaded for analysis, and can be easily shared on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other media networks.