Pundits' Guide Shows You the Money
For some time I've been collecting and organizing the party financial data for inclusion in a systematic way into the Pundits' Guide database. Now, I've finally had enough uninterrupted time to assemble it into its own module. Presenting, for your interest and amusement: the first version of the "Browse Finance$" page.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
I hope you like this new page at the Pundits' Guide. Please feel free to provide feedback in the comments section or to me directly by email. And take a second to pick one or two quarterly or annual returns and proofread my data entry work, to help other readers of the Guide.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Annual contribution data is available from 2000 to 2008 at present. Of course, the 2009 data won't be available until around this time next year.
- Quarterly contribution data is available from 2005 (when its collection was first mandated) forward, on its own tab.
- You can drill down by Party or Year, or any combination of both, on either tab. The tables and charts will redraw themselves appropriately.
- Remember that there were a number of rule changes along the way, so that prior to 2004 contributions came from Individuals, Corporations, Labour organizations, and a variety of Other changing categories as well that I've lumped in together. Post-2004 only Individuals could contribute to federal political parties.
- Most bars in the charts break down contributions by donation size as well. Technically there are 3 categories: (i) anonymous contributions of <= $25/$20 (it used to be $25, but later became $20), (ii) contributions of <= $200 where the donor is known to the party, but their names are not reported to Elections Canada, (iii) named contributors of > $200 over the year, whose names must be reported. In some older data, the donation size is not always reported alongside the donor category by Elections Canada in their datasets (the case for 2000 here). So the convention I followed was that I lumped (i) and (ii) together in the '$200 and under' category on the charts, and I lumped the 'size unknown' in with the 'over $200' category. I find it nice to always see the proportion of funds coming from these two general groupings.
- In every table, you will find little Elections Canada logos, which are links that point to the parties' annual or quarterly reports as appropriate, so you can jump directly there to consult the original data (and proofread my work, if you feel up to it). I find this makes it a lot easier to find the return I want, rather than navigating through their search engines.
- All the data was manually entered by me from returns available on the Elections Canada website, where it is only available in "as submitted" form (none of it is "as reviewed" there at all, yet).
I hope you like this new page at the Pundits' Guide. Please feel free to provide feedback in the comments section or to me directly by email. And take a second to pick one or two quarterly or annual returns and proofread my data entry work, to help other readers of the Guide.
Labels: Data Analysis, Party Finance
posted by The Pundits' Guide at
9:45 PM
2 Comments:
This is a great tool PG!
Makes my digging around a lot easier to do. Which will make me more likely to check out notions that come to mind.
Question about how EC categorizes contributors in the quarterly data. If I donate $100 in Q1, that contribution will be counted in the less than $200 category.
If I follow that by giving $150 in Q2, is that second contribution reported in the greater than $200 catagory [because the cumulative annual to date determines]?
Another question, I believe you said you entered the data manualy. Does that mean 50 quarters/years X 5 or 6 parties X 4 donor categories = well over a thosand figures that had to be entered? !?!
Hi Ken, and thanks for the comment.
The answer to your first question is Yes, and that's why the numbers of contributors can't ever be summed across quarters.
To your second question, Yes again: I first collected the data for every year and every quarter manually into a spreadsheet. Next I played with it a bit to understand how it all worked. Then together with other financial data I've also collected (e.g., on subsidies, on riding data, on transfers in and out, and from party financial statements), I started to think about how to model it all properly into a normalized relational database for all future analyses that I wanted to do, and finally I actually created the base tables, child tables and meta-data tables (collecting the french translations for all the relevant categories; hope I didn't screw those up too badly).
Remember, it's a bit tricky because of the way the rules keep changing over time. Elections Canada itself doesn't ever intend to try and present that different data together, I've been told, so it was quite a bit of work to try and present something that would be legitimately comparable over time, without losing the important differences between different time periods ... although I thought it was important to try, because we want to make inferences and draw conclusions about how the relative methods favour or hurt different parties, or watch how they acclimatize to them over time.
Once the relational database tables were designed and created, actually entering the data was not too bad (something you can do in spurts when an episode of Family Guy or Don Newman is on TV in the background). But you do have to obtain the number of contributors over $200 by subtraction, and there are some other fiddly things to watch out for, which is why I've been hoping to crowd-source the final proofread out to people who can now quite easily click on the relevant return to cross-check against.
I'm glad you find the tool useful, Ken, and appreciate your taking the time to raise some questions.
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