LobbyView.org has 1.2 million public records of
congressional lobbying, and a flexible interface designed to make research simple. MIT News spoke with Kim, the Class of 1956 Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science, about the project.
Q: What is LobbyView.org, and how did you create it?
A: LobbyView.org is a publicly available online database where researchers and journalists and others who are interested in politics will be able to search the universe of the political activities that have been filed and reported, so that they can understand how legislative politics, especially, works in the U.S. For example, people can easily search how, and to what extent, firms engage in political activities.
There is a legal requirement that any lobbyist or lobbying firm representing clients disclose lobbying activities performed on behalf of those clients. Such information has been available in the form of lobbying reports that are filed quarterly. Currently there are more than 1.2 million reports that have been filed since 1999. I downloaded the files from the Senate Office of Public Records and then developed a program to automatically parse those reports.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-09-database-bright-washington-lobbying.html#jCp
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