By Adam Gaffin
Universal Hub

Tip O'Neil famously said all politics is local. And nothing is more local than campaign contributions from people in the towns and neighborhoods you cover. The elections may be over, but state and federal campaign-contribution databases can provide a series of interesting stories—who's giving money to whom, and why? Let's take a look at what's in these databases and what to do with it.

In Massachusetts, political finances are overseen by the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF). On its website, www.mass.gov/ocpf, you'll want to link to “Online campaign finance reports,” a searchable database of contributions of more than $50 and expenditures. On Jan. 22, candidates for local and state offices (i.e., city councilors, aldermen, selectmen, state representatives, state senators and statewide office holders such as governor and attorney general) are required to file their annual reports. Most years, these might be fairly boring, but since 2006 was an election year, the next round of reports might have some interesting figures in them.

Click on the link for the finance reports and you can select “View Reports” or “Search Contributions.” The former lets you see donations and expenses reports from specific candidates—handy for overall stories on how much your local state reps or city councilors took in and from whom.

The latter lets you search for donations on a series of criteria, including “town” (so if you cover Arlington, you can get a list of everybody in the town who made a donation of more than $50; unfortunately, all Boston neighborhoods are lumped under "Boston"), “employer” (working on a story on Comcast or Nstar's political influence? See how many of their execs donated money and to whom) and “occupation” (although this is kind of useless by itself because there's no standard classification for different types of jobs).

You can also specify how to sort the data. By default, it's set to sort by the donor's last name, but you can also sort by date, amount of contribution, candidate and other options.

Once you have a list of contributors, you can either browse it or export it to a file for more analysis in a spreadsheet program, which is something you'll probably want to do anyway, if only because the online database has a timer built in. You can't bookmark any results pages you get, so without exporting them you'd have to start your searches all over again each time you visit.

One other link to try: “View Reports,” which lets you see contributions from political action committees and ballot-question groups.

The federal equivalent of OCPF is the Federal Elections Commission, which oversees contributions for presidential, congressional and U.S. senate elections. Its searchable database is at

www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/disclosure_data_search.shtml

As with the state database, you can search by individual contributor or candidate. The advanced search form for individuals
(www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/advindsea.shtml) will probably be more useful than the basic form because you can search by state or ZIP code. Unfortunately, unlike the state’s website, you can't export the results to a spreadsheet file.

However, American University's School of Communications has
Congressional data by state available in .dbf files (which can be used in database applications such as Access and FoxPro). Massachusetts data is available at:

www1.soc.american.edu/campfin/state_base_06.cfm [Editors note—This site is currently under redevelopment.]

Open Secrets has an interesting database that lets you find out who's paying for travel by members of congress:

www.opensecrets.org/travel/search.asp?srchtype=P

The Investigative Reporters and Editors Campaign Finance site has links to articles on how to figure out what all the numbers mean:

www.campaignfinance.org