Group Provides Fast Access to Money-Politics Connection

You can search the database via a number of routes, such as interest group, legislator, bill, or topic, and there are numerous subcategories for each main category. For instance, under topics, there are many that may be on target for your beat, including agriculture, energy, environment, and transportation. Each of these categories has many subcategories (e.g., environment has breakouts such as air, coastal, forestry, recycling, and wildlife).

Whatever route you take, you'll quickly end up with considerable detail about the correlation of money with that particular issue or legislator. You'll also be able to get information on the timing of a contribution, whether the money source was for or against a bill, and how a legislator voted.

The base data, which is expected to be updated frequently, comes from the Library of Congress and the Center for Responsive Politics. MAPLight, a nonprofit organization based in Berkeley, Calif., that says it shines a Light on Money And Politics (hence the organization name), first provided a similar service for the California legislature in 2006, according to a May 16, 2007, press release; Dan Newman, 510-868-0894.

For many more resources on money and politics, and alternative means of verifying what you may discover on the MAPLight data base, see theTipSheet of March 2, 2005.