$450,000
2015 • 3 years • Strengthening American Democracy
MapLight is a Berkeley, CA-based non-profit, non-partisan organization that collects, analyzes, and publishes millions of financial records related to campaign contributions. It reports on money's influential role in American politics, and it develops reports and data visualizations that demonstrate who funds campaigns and who benefits from contributions. Its services are free, and regularly inform national news reports, scholarly research, issue advocacy, court decisions, and legislative debates. Award funds will support MapLight's core services and be used to expand the types of data it gathers, to improve the quality of analysis it provides, and to increase the scope and effectiveness of its publishing and communications efforts.
$250,000
2013 • 2 years • Strengthening American Democracy
MapLight collects, analyzes, and publishes millions of financial records to provide campaign contribution and lobbying expenditure data side-by-side with legislative votes in a single database. This allows citizens, journalists, and researchers to analyze monetary inputs and political outcomes in a large-scale, systematic way, though MapLight itself does not draw conclusions about cause and effect. Its services are free, and regularly inform national news reports, scholarly research, issue advocacy, court decisions, and legislative debates.
$75,000
2012 • 1 year • Strengthening American Democracy
MapLight documents the data showing possible connections between campaign contributions, lobbyists, and interest groups on legislative outcomes at the state and federal level. Its services are free, and regularly inform national news reports, scholarly research, issue advocacy, court decisions, and legislative debates. On its website, citizens and others can find out how each individual legislator voted, how much money legislators received from parties with an interest in a vote’s outcome, how special-interest campaign contributions correlate with legislators’ voting records, and what contributions were made to a legislator immediately before and after a vote took place.