skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Donor activity is associated with US legislators’ attention to political issues
Campaign contributions are a staple of congressional life. Yet, the search for tangible effects of congressional donations often focuses on the association between contributions and votes on congressional bills. We present an alternative approach by considering the relationship between money and legislators’ speech. Floor speeches are an important component of congressional behavior, and reflect a legislator’s policy priorities and positions in a way that voting cannot. Our research provides the first comprehensive analysis of the association between a legislator’s campaign donors and the policy issues they prioritize with congressional speech. Ultimately, we find a robust relationship between donors and speech, indicating a more pervasive role of money in politics than previously assumed. We use a machine learning framework on a new dataset that brings together legislator metadata for all representatives in the US House between 1995 and 2018, including committee assignments, legislative speech, donation records, and information about Political Action Committees. We compare information about donations against other potential explanatory variables, such as party affiliation, home state, and committee assignments, and find that donors consistently have the strongest association with legislators’ issue-attention. We further contribute a procedure for identifying speech and donation events that occur in close proximity to one another and share meaningful connections, identifying the proverbial needles in the haystack of speech and donation activity in Congress which may be cases of interest for investigative journalism. Taken together, our framework, data, and findings can help increase the transparency of the role of money in politics.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2008761
PAR ID:
10482978
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Editor(s):
Farjam, Mike
Publisher / Repository:
PLoS One
Date Published:
Journal Name:
PLOS ONE
Volume:
18
Issue:
9
ISSN:
1932-6203
Page Range / eLocation ID:
e0291169
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; (, Predicting Food Donor Contribution Behavior Using Support Vector Regression)
    Hunger and food insecurity are present in each American county. Government and non-government organizations are working to address food insecurity in the United States. Food banks are nonprofit hunger relief organizations that collect food and monetary donations from donors and distribute food to local agencies which serve people in need. Contributions come from retail donors, communities, and food manufacturers. The uncertainty of donation amounts and frequency is a challenge for food banks in the fight against hunger. In this research, we analyze local food bank donation data and propose a predictive model to forecast the contribution of different donors. Our study shows the necessary behavioral attributes to classify donors and the best way to cluster donor data to improve the prediction model. We also compare the accuracy of prediction for different conventional forecasting techniques with the proposed Support Vector Regression (SVR) model. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; (, JMIR Medical Informatics)
    BackgroundLiving kidney donation currently constitutes approximately a quarter of all kidney donations. There exist barriers that preclude prospective donors from donating, such as medical ineligibility and costs associated with donation. A better understanding of perceptions of and barriers to living donation could facilitate the development of effective policies, education opportunities, and outreach strategies and may lead to an increased number of living kidney donations. Prior research focused predominantly on perceptions and barriers among a small subset of individuals who had prior exposure to the donation process. The viewpoints of the general public have rarely been represented in prior research. ObjectiveThe current study designed a web-scraping method and machine learning algorithms for collecting and classifying comments from a variety of online sources. The resultant data set was made available in the public domain to facilitate further investigation of this topic. MethodsWe collected comments using Python-based web-scraping tools from the New York Times, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit. We developed a set of guidelines for the creation of training data and manual classification of comments as either related to living organ donation or not. We then classified the remaining comments using deep learning. ResultsA total of 203,219 unique comments were collected from the above sources. The deep neural network model had 84% accuracy in testing data. Further validation of predictions found an actual accuracy of 63%. The final database contained 11,027 comments classified as being related to living kidney donation. ConclusionsThe current study lays the groundwork for more comprehensive analyses of perceptions, myths, and feelings about living kidney donation. Web-scraping and machine learning classifiers are effective methods to collect and examine opinions held by the general public on living kidney donation. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; (, Social Science Computer Review)
    null (Ed.)
    This article explores congressional campaigning on the web in 2016. What impact did the unique nature of the 2016 election have on those involved with the creation and maintenance of congressional campaign websites? Did it cause them to alter their approach to online campaigning? Using data from a survey of campaign insiders, we find that the factors that influence how congressional campaigns view and use their websites were largely impervious to the unique electoral environment. Results show that, consistent with previous election years, campaigns maintained a fairly uniform view of likely visitors and target audiences, and they tended to see their campaign websites as digital hubs, best used for capturing the campaign’s overall message. We also find that, as in other years, nonincumbents continued to use their websites to campaign more aggressively than incumbents. Overall, the results suggest that congressional campaigning on the web is primarily driven by stable factors that transcend technological advancements and shifts in the political environment. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; (, BMJ Global Health)
    null (Ed.)
    Introduction Living-donor kidney transplantation is the gold standard treatment for patients with end-stage kidney disease. However, potential donors ubiquitously face financial as well as logistical barriers. To remove these disincentives from living kidney donations, the governments of 23 countries have implemented reimbursement programmes that shift the burdens of non-medical costs from donors to the governments or private entities. However, scientific evidence for the effectiveness of these programmes is scarce. The present study investigates whether these reimbursement programmes designed to ease the financial and logistical barriers succeeded in increasing the number of living kidney donations at the country level. The study examined within-country variations in the timing of such reimbursement programmes. Method The study applied the difference-in-difference (two-way panel fixed-effect) technique on the Poisson distribution to estimate the effects of these reimbursement programmes on a 17 year long (2000–2016) dataset covering 109 countries where living donor kidney transplants were performed. Results The results indicated that reimbursement programmes have a statistically significant positive effect. Overall, the model predicted that reimbursement programmes increased country-level donation numbers by a factor of 1.12–1.16. Conclusion Reimbursement programmes may be an effective approach to alleviate the kidney shortage worldwide. Further analysis is warranted on the type of reimbursement programmes and the ethical dimension of each type of such programmes. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM ’20))
    In contrast to traditional online videos, live multi-streaming supports real-time social interactions between multiple streamers and viewers, such as donations. However, donation and multi-streaming channel recommendations are challenging due to complicated streamer and viewer relations, asymmetric communications, and the tradeoff between personal interests and group interactions. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Stream Party (MSP) and formulate a new multi-streaming recommendation problem, called Donation and MSP Recommendation (DAMRec). We propose Multi-stream Party Recommender System (MARS) to extract latent features via socio-temporal coupled donation-response tensor factorization for donation and MSP recommendations. Experimental results on Twitch and Douyu manifest that MARS significantly outperforms existing recommenders by at least 38.8% in terms of hit ratio and mean average precision. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email