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Effective record linkage for mining campaign contribution data

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Abstract

Up to now, most campaign contribution data have been reported at the level of the donation. While these are interesting, one often needs to have information at the level of the donor. Obtaining information at that level is difficult as there is neither a unique repository of donations nor any standard across existing repositories. In order to more meaningfully mine campaign contribution data, political scientists need an accurate way of grouping, or linking, together donations made by the same donor. In this paper, we describe a record linkage technique that is applicable to various sources and across large geographical areas. We show how it may be effectively applied in the context of nationwide donation data and report on new, previously unattainable results about campaign contributors in the 2007–2008 US election cycle.

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Notes

  1. See www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/ftpdet.shtml.

  2. See www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/mmsa2003.html#ascii.

  3. The privacy concern may actually be quite prevalent as these same individuals (found in our linkage but who did not report giving to any candidates in the survey) are also more than twice as likely as others not to report their income.

  4. Even when the “offending” individuals are not removed, FPR does not exceed 0.039 and precision does not go below 0.71 for any of the candidates.

  5. See www.aiddata.org/content/index.

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Acknowledgments

Our thanks to Yao Huang, Weston Rowley, David Wilcox and David Lassen for research assistance and computer code. We are also grateful to David Magleby and Joseph Olson for their support, encouragement, and advice. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, 84602, USA

    C. Giraud-Carrier & S. Cueva

  2. Department of Political Science, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

    J. Goodliffe & B. M. Jones

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  1. C. Giraud-Carrier
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  2. J. Goodliffe
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  3. B. M. Jones
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  4. S. Cueva
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Correspondence to C. Giraud-Carrier.

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Giraud-Carrier, C., Goodliffe, J., Jones, B.M. et al. Effective record linkage for mining campaign contribution data. Knowl Inf Syst 45, 389–416 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-014-0812-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-014-0812-5

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