yontartu / citizens-united

Flatiron School Project with Phoebe Wong

Federal Contracts & Campaign Contributions Before & After Citizens United

Module #3 Project @ The Flatiron School

Team members: Joey Goodman and Phoebe Wong

Executive summary:

The goal of this project is to present preliminary findings on a unique data set we constructed that matches federal contractor data and campaign contribution data.

Contents

• Introduction
  • Problem statement
  • Dataset
• Analysis
  • Data cleaning
  • Exploratory data analysis

Introduction

Problem statement

Our goal is to identify the effects of political spending on federal contract awards before and after the Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United and SpeechNow vs FEC.

Data set

The main dataset of this project has two main sources.

• Federal contractor data is downloaded from: USASpending.gov (from 2008-2018)
• Campaign contribution data is scrapped from: OpenSecrets.org

Analysis

Data cleaning

We merged the datasets with some novel techniques and created multiple unique features for this analysis. For explanations on the methodology, see Mod3_Project_JG_PW.ipynb.

Exploratory data analysis

We seek to answer 4 main questions in this project:

1. Have federal contractors made more campaign donations since Citizens United?
2. Do federal contractors w/ PAC donations receive more contract awards?
3. Do federal contractors donate a larger share to Democrats than non-contractors?
4. Do federal contractors make the same amount of campaign contributions as non-contractors?