Elected officials collect large sums of money to run their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws. Fellow Daniel Newman is co-founder and executive director of MapLight, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization revealing money's influence on politics. MapLight serves journalists, issue-oriented nonprofit groups, and interested citizens, providing in-depth information about lawmakers, votes, and special-interest influence. MapLight combines campaign contribution data with how every legislator votes, showing patterns of money and influence with unprecedented speed and ease. Prior to MapLight, uncovering connections between money and political influence had been slow and expensive for large groups and near-prohibitive for smaller groups and ordinary citizens, who had to individually research, assemble, and analyze hundreds or thousands of pieces of data on votes and contributions to put together a big-picture view of the influence behind a single bill. Now, information that used to require weeks of work is available at the click of a mouse. By generating widely disseminated, evidence-based findings on the relationship between campaign donations and legislative outcomes, MapLight allows citizens and journalists to explore how money influences government results and empowers the groups in society that hold government accountable.
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