• Features
  • Entity Lookup and Crosswalk
  • Itemized Data
  • Aggregate Data
  • Support/Community
• License
• Endpoints
• Common Parameters
  • API Key
  • Pagination / Limiting
  • Aggregate Limiting / Cycle
  • Ranges and OR Searches
• Client Libraries
• Bulk Data
• Data Changelog

Programmatic access tracking the influence of money in politics, brought to you by
the Sunlight Foundation.

Features

Entity Lookup and Crosswalk

Look up IDs for political entities by name, retrieve basic biographical and other meta information, or find an entity ID from a variety of source IDs, including:

• Bioguide
• CRP
• NIMSP
• Sunlight's Lobbyist Registration Tracker URL

Itemized Data

Search and filter individual contributions, contracts, grants and lobbying registrations.

Aggregate Data

Find the most active Politicians, Individuals, Organizations and Industries based on receipts, expenditures and lobbying.

Support/Community

We have an API mailing list, and can be found on Twitter at @sunlightlabs.

License

Data returned by this service is subject to the use restrictions set by the Federal Election Commission. By accessing this data, you understand that you are using the data subject to all applicable local, state and federal law, including FEC restrictions.

All data licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. By downloading data and accessing the API you are agreeing to the terms of the license.

Federal campaign contribution and lobbying records must be attributed to OpenSecrets.org.

State campaign contribution records must be attributed to FollowTheMoney.org.

Endpoints

All calls to the Influence Explorer API share the same root URI:

http://transparencydata.com/api/:version/

The current verison is 1.0.

The URI scheme is not strictly RESTful, but methods can be grouped into 6 logical categories:

Endpoint	Description
Entity Lookups	Search for politicians, individuals, organizations and industries, or retrieve crosswalk IDs from a variety of sources.
Politician Aggregates	Find aggregate campaign finance information about political candidates at the state and federal levels.
Individual Aggregates	Find aggregate campaign finance information about individual donors.
Organization Aggregates	Find aggregate campaign finance information about organizations, including PACs, corporations and lobbying firms.
Industry Aggregates	Find aggregate campaign finance information about various industries are involved in lobbying.
Itemized Search Methods	Search itemized campaign contributions, federal contract awards, federal grant awards and federal lobbying registrations.

Common Parameters

API Key

All requests to the Influence Explorer API require a Sunlight API key. An API key is free to register and has no usage limits.

API keys can be provided with a request through the query string:

/entities.json?apikey=[your_api_key]

Pagination / Limiting

All itemized endpoints respond to page and per_page parameters to scroll through the data, passed like so:

/contributions.json?page=2&per_page=100

By default, the first page is returned, with 1,000 records per page. The maximum per_page value is 100,000.

Aggregate Limiting / Cycle

Except where specified, all aggregate endpoints respond to limit and cycle parameters, to limit the number of top results returned, and to base superlative calculations on a given election year:

/aggregates/pols/top_10.json?cycle=2012

In this example, the limit parameter is part of the method name (top_:limit).

Ranges and OR Searches

Some parameters are specified in this documentation as the types comparison or inclusion. These fields support logical operators prepended to their values to denote a range of values or multiple values to include:

Comparison (range)

>|	Greater than or equal to, eg. >|1000
<	Less than, eg. <1000000
><||	Between, eg. ><|1000|5000

Inclusion (boolean OR)

2006|2008|2010

Include results from 2006, 2008 and 2010.

Client Libraries

• PHP by Dao Quang Minh
• Python by The Sunlight Foundation
• Ruby by Wynn Netherland and Luigi Montanez

Bulk Data

For analysis that requires access to large portions of our data, we offer (and strongly encourage!) a bulk data set for free. See the Bulk Data page for a list of available downloads.

Data Changelog

Sep 29, 2014 Update

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 9/5/2014 release.

June 2, 2014 Update

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 5/5/2014 release.
• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 5/5/2014 release.

March 24, 2014 Update

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 3/3/2014 release.

November 22, 2013 Update

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 11/6/2013 release.
• State Campaign Finance Data: updated to NIMSP's private 11/18/2013 release.

October 30, 2013 Update

• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 10/10/2013 release.

July 26, 2013 Update

• Federal and State Campaign Finance Data: Addressed data quality issues in all previous uploads. New versions of each previous release now available

July 25, 2013 Update

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 6/1/2013 release.
• State Campaign Finance Data: updated to NIMSP's private 7/3/2013 release.

June 4, 2013 Update

• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 4/29/2013 release.

April 3, 2013 Update

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 2/28/2013 release.
• State Campaign Finance Data: updated to NIMSP's private 3/11/2013 release.
• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 1/25/2013 release.

March 11, 2013 Update

• Contractor Misconduct Data: updated to POGO's 3/5/2013 release.
• Regulations Data: Influence Explorer now uses data from Docket Wrench, which is updated on a daily basis.

January 9, 2013

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 11/29/2012 release.

October 31, 2012

• State Campaign Finance Data: updated to private 10/18/2012 release.

October 25, 2012

• Federal Grants: updated to USASpending.gov's 10/19/2012 release.

October 15, 2012

• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 9/21/2012 release.

August 31, 2012

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 8/24/2012 release.

April 23, 2012

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to private 4/2/2012 CRP release.
• Contractor Misconduct Data: updated to POGO's 3/3/2012 release.

March 21, 2012

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to private 3/16/2012 CRP release.
• State Campaign Finance Data: updated to private 3/13/2012 release.
• Federal Grants & Contracts: updated to USASpending.gov's 3/1/2012 release.
• Federal Advisory Committee Act: updated with GSA's release of 2011 data.

February 24, 2012

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to private 2/15/2012 CRP release.
• State Campaign Finance Data: updated to NIMSP's 1/31/2012 release.

January 6, 2012

• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 12/8/2011 release.
• Contractor Misconduct Data: updated to POGO's 12/21/2011 release.

October 27, 2011

-Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 10/3/2011 release. -EPA ECHO Data: updated to 10/19/2011 release.

July 23, 2011

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 5/20/2011 release.
• State Campaign Finance Data: updated to NIMSP's 7/11/2011 release (private).

June 21, 2011

• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 5/24/2011 release.
• Federal Grants & Contracts: updated to USASpending.gov's 6/1/2011 release.

June 6, 2011

• Contractor Misconduct Data: initial release of Project on Government Oversight's Federal Contractor Misconduct data, 1995-2011.

April 20, 2011

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 4/13/2011 release (private).
• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 3/25/2011 release.
• State Campaign Finance Data: updated to NIMSP's March 2011 release (private).
• Federal Grants & Contracts: updated to USASpending.gov's 3/1/2011 release.

March 22, 2011

• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 2/22/2011 release.
• Federal Grants & Contracts: updated to USASpending.gov's 3/1/2011 release.

February 1, 2011

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 1/8/2011 release.
• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 11/15/2010 release.
• State Campaign Finance Data: updated to NIMSP's December 2010 release (private).
• Federal Grants & Contracts: updated to USASpending.gov's 1/1/2011 release.

December 2, 2010

• Earmark Data: initial release of Taxpayers for Common Sense's fiscal year 2008-2010 earmark data.

November 8, 2010

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 10/23/2010 release.
• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 10/24/2010 release.

October 26, 2010

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 9/30/2010 release.
• State Campaign Finance Data: updated to NIMSP's September 2010 release (private).
• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 9/20/2010 release.

September 9, 2010

• Federal Campaign Finance Data: updated to CRP's 8/23/2010 release.
• State Campaign Finance Data: updated to NIMSP's June 2010 release (private).
• Federal Lobbying Data: updated to CRP's 8/27/2010 release.
• Federal Grants & Contracts: provided by USASpending.gov on request in April 2010.

Initial Data

• All data current as of March 2010.