Track oil donations to presidential candidates

Submitted by John Jones on Thu, 2008-01-31 10:27

information graphic oil industry contributions to U.S. presidential candidates

PriceofOil.org has posted a dynamic information graphic showing contributions from the oil industry to U.S. presidential candidates.

In the “relationship view,” the more money a politician has accepted from the oil industry, the bigger their picture is on the map. The more money they have accepted from an individual company, the thicker the line will be that connects them. Elected officials & companies are positioned by their relationships, those that are close together tend to have similar patterns of giving and receiving. In the “table view,” politicians are ranked by their total dollar amount received, together with the companies that donated them.

via Information Aesthetics

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Comments

Neato, but I'm not sure I'm

Submitted by timturner on Thu, 2008-01-31 17:45.

Neato, but I'm not sure I'm convinced. While I appreciate the underlying issue here, and I definitely realize it is important to keep an eye on these things, I wonder about this representation. Corporate campaign contributions can just as easily be read as a barometer of expectations: expectations of which nominee a party will choose, but also of which party will win the election (see this article for one example of this argument). So, one glance at this graph suggests that Giuliani (who, as everyone knows by now, just left the race) is most beholden to oil money. But couldn't it just as easily reflect the fact that for a long time he was the Republican frontrunner? And ditto for Hillary Clinton? It looks nice, but the underlying data has to be more complex than this.

Donation does not equal causation

Submitted by John Jones on Thu, 2008-01-31 18:41.

I’ll give you that: certainly donation does not equal causation. However, I do think that this is a great tool to make these donations visible. It made me think of the scene in Sicko where he displays the donations from the healthcare industry that politicians have received (it’s in the trailer below).

Or the graphic linked to this New York Times article. In each of these cases, while the graphics do make arguments, they shouldn’t be decontextualized and those arguments shouldn’t be the only arguments. Ideally, the graphics would make the data visible in a way that is as objective as possible so that that data can serve as part of a larger argument.

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