I have been to a couple of Campaign Lab “Hack Days” and picked up a project on measuring political donations. I decided to take an innovate, don’t invent approach. Here are my notes …
On the first day, found the code for such a web page; I have reverse engineered the data model and database, and have made a landing page for my implementations of this tool; I have inserted my data file into Neil’s code and it can be viewed here for Q4 23 and also for all 2023, although I need to do some work with the javascript; this page’s presentation is not very satisfactory.
I made a fork of Neil’s code.
In addition, Campaign Lab has incubated Who funds the Conservative Party?
On my third visit, I met the author of donation whistle, [ the site | the code ]. I really like this; it has a real time feed from the EC and answers some of the questions one wants to ask really well. I have starred it in github and raised one issue already.
I was later pointed at who funds them at mysociety.org
I have worked with my 2023 extract to prototype some of the queries I plan to run and report on.
April 2024
I think there are three dimensions we want to measure, and my experience is that this may be best done by quarter. As it the moment, I am restricting myself to chart formats supported by excel. I am also restricting myself to the three big parties. These restrictions are because of the difficulty in handling the large and small scales required. The charts are,
- The amount of money by top three parties, by quarter
- Neil’s buckets by quarter, as the year doesn’t scale within the infographic
- a size of donation frequency distribution by party
- funding by source, both volume and as a proportion of total; it might be good if we could build dynamic charts to turn public funding on/off.
The screen might look like this, or the front page could have buttons to second pages to deal with Money, Neil’s buckets, frequency within Party and by source.
![](https://davelevy.info/wiki/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/draft-political-funding.png)
At the moment, I plan to make the charts, and use the code to present them.
WordPress Charting
I found these pages
- https://crocoblock.com/blog/best-wordpress-chart-plugins/
- https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wpdatatables/
- https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/visualizer/
The query I used to find the tools.
My data sources
Mainly the EC,
- Their search portal, with filters set
- Their candidate spending page for 2019, does this do all, or only those that spend more than an amount
I am trying to create a political donations site.
I found the code for such a web page; I have reverse engineered the data model and database, and have made a landing page for my implementations of this tool; I have inserted my data file into Neil’s code and it can be viewed here for Q4 23.
I also created an all 2023 data file, but the javascript and the infographic is broken. The contents of the infographic are not scaled sufficiently; I wonder if it’s the two huge donations during the year. NB the scale at the side is also not context sensitive. I have tried to fix it using HTML/CSS but very little joy.
What it should look like is the last image on https://davelevy.info/wiki/political-donations-2023/
It needs someone with better javascript than me to fix.