Politcal Contributions from Think Tank Employees During the 2012 Election Year

These data include political contributions from employees of the top ten U.S. think tanks during the 2012 election year. They were scraped from OpenSecrets.org. These data have been manually cleaned to consolidate duplicate persons and eliminate persons who were not actually think tank employees.

These data were compiled for a blog post examining the political bias of think tank employees as revealed through their political contribution decisions. They were scraped from OpenSecrets.org using a python script available here.

Explanation of Data

donations-top-ten-think-tanks-2012.csv

Variable	Explanation
id	Integer assigned to each unique individual indentified in the raw data.
First Name	First name scraped for each individual contribution. May vary between multiple entries for a single individual.
Last Name	Last name scraped for each individual contribution. May vary between multiple entries for a single individual.
City	City given as place of residence at time of reporting.
State	State given as place of residence at time of reporting.
Zip	Zip code given as place of residence at time of reporting.
Think Tank	The name of the think tank employer of the individual. These names have been manually edited to enforce uniformity.
Date	Date of the contribution.
Amount	Amount of the contribution.
Recipient	The politician or partisan group receiving the reported contribution.
Partisan Recipient	The know partisanship of the recipient. D is Democratic, R is Republican, L is Libertarian, and Other is other or unknown.

990s-top-ten-think-tanks-2012.csv

Variable	Explanation
Think Tank	The name of the think tank.
Employees	The number of employees reported on the 2012 form 990 filed with the IRS.
Revenue	The revenuses reported on the 2012 form 990 filed with the IRS.
Expenses	The expenses reported on the 2012 form 990 filed with the IRS.
Net Income	The net income reported on the 2012 form 990 filed with the IRS.
Net Assets	The net assets reported on the 2012 form 990 filed with the IRS.

think-tank-donation-summary.json

Variable	Explanation
name	The name of the think tank.
employees	The number of employees reported on the 2012 form 990 filed with the IRS.
etod	The sum of employees for a given think tank who gave to Democrats or Democratic groups.
etor	The sum of employees for a given think tank who gave to Republicans or Republican groups.
etol	The sum of employees for a given think tank who gave to Libertarians or Libertarian groups.
etoo	The sum of employees for a given think tank who gave to other or unknown groups.
ctod	The sum of cash contributions for a given think tank's employees which went to Democrats or Democratic groups.
ctor	The sum of cash contributions for a given think tank's employees which went to Republicans or Republican groups.
ctol	The sum of cash contributions for a given think tank's employees which went to Libertarians or Libertarian groups.
ctoo	The sum of cash contributions for a given think tank's employees which went to other or unknown groups.