• While summarizing the changes Texas Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst hopes to implement with the Senate Select Committee on Open Government, Curt Olsen reminds, “Initiatives for 'open government' either improve access or hinder it." Olsen maintains that each change should be watched carefully, as, “ State lawmakers can pass laws that enhance openness and transparency or they can pass laws that cause mischief and erect a new hurdle for taxpayers to have access to government." The proposed changes include: “The use of new technologies and future technological advances as relates to the creation of public information” and “Study ways to define and address frivolous and/or overly-burdensome open records requests. “State lawmakers can pass laws that enhance openness and transparency or they can pass laws that cause mischief and erect a new hurdle for taxpayers to have access to government.” For the entire list and Olsen’s opinion, check out his post on Texas Budget Source.
• In her assessment of the state of Minnesota transparency, Mary Tracey maintains, “What matters to most citizens is the right to access to information by and about state, regional and local government information – state agencies, county boards, advisory committees and regulators, every entity from the Governor’s office to the local school board. In her post on Poking Around With Mary, she summarizes the open government portals available to Minnesotans: The twin pillars of access in Minnesota are the Data Practices Act and the Open Meeting Law.  Essential guides to each include these:  Open Meeting Law,Government Data Practices Act.  The Legislative Reference Libraryalso offers a comprehensive list of guides and information about parallel laws and regulations in other states." She urges citizens who are concerned with government transparency to “be aware of the agencies’ responsibilities to assure compliance with the spirit and the letter of the law.”

Today NPR's Planet Money team aired a story about disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s legal lobbying activities (as few of those as there may have been), highlighting how problematic even currently legal lobbying practices are. Also today, the New York Times pointed out some of the huge loopholes in current lobbying law -- Newt Gingrich, for example, isn’t actually a lobbyist, he just spends lots of his time talking to lawmakers about how policy should be made. Y’know, as a historian.

The powerful (and corrupting, as we saw with Abramoff) influence of special interest money in politics can be extremely hard to follow, but better lobbying laws could change that. Lobbying activity is the most tangible means to measure the money and effort that powerful interests are spending to influence lawmakers.

Closing the loopholes that let “historians” like Newt Gingrich act as stealth lobbyists and creating real-time, online disclosure about just who lobbyists are meeting with and what they’re talking about would be a powerful first step to shining a light on who’s actually influencing our lawmakers.

How do we fix it? A good first step, as Daniel wrote the other day, is the Lobbying Disclosure Enhancement Act, introduced by Rep. Quigley. The bill needs your help to get more support in Congress. You can write to your rep right from OpenCongress.org to ask them to co-sponsor the bill. You can also read more about Sunlight’s lobbying recommendations and sign up to get updates on lobbying reform here.

Recent calls for technologists to hire lobbyists to educate Washington on internet issues miss a significant part of the big picture. Congress makes bad technology decisions because it has dismantled its ability to evaluate policy issues. While public mobilization and lobbying efforts can affect decision-making through political pressure, lobbying to educate congress on technology issues is like trying to teach a fish to sing.

The congressional technology lobotomy arose from two fateful decisions. First, Congress closed down its specialized office of nonpartisan technology experts in 1995, which provided a comprehensive view of technology issues. Second, it systematically undermined its remaining staff by spreading them too thin, eroding Congress’s ability to dive deeply into an issue.

The Office of Technology Assessment was created in 1972 to equip Congress with “new and effective means for securing competent, unbiased information concerning the physical, biological, economic, social, and political effects” of technology. OTA “was intended to facilitate congressional access to expertise and permit legislators to consider objectively information presented by the executive branch, interest groups, and other stakeholders to controversial policy questions,” in the words of a CRS report. It was a runaway success.

OTA’s small staff of experts (around 140 at its maximum) generated hundreds of reports at the relatively modest cost of $20 million annually. Unfortunately, it was defunded in 1995 as part of a broader effort to make the Congress appear more efficient. Despite repeated calls for OTA’s reinstatement, nothing has filled the void, and policymaking has suffered.

OTA’s defunded left staffers for committees and individual members of Congress to shoulder the increasingly complicated burden of evaluating technology issues. They are ill-equipped for the challenge. Over the last 25 years, congressional staff salaries have remained flat, with staff spread thin over a wide range of issues. With an average House staffer in a policy-role earning between $40-60,000, attracting and retaining top talent is virtually impossible. With a 10.4% cut in Congress' budget over a two year period that's taking place now, prompting layoffs and pay freezes, the lifeblood of smart decision-making is being drained away.

Increasing lobbying on technology issues is an easy, but ultimately insufficient, response to this problem. $92 million was spent for lobbyists representing for tv/movie/music issues in 2011, which is the same amount spent by telecom services and equipment companies. This monetary arms race may level the playing field for the well-to-do, but it hasn’t created good results. And both sides have good reason to manipulate the law to keep out the next wave of entrepreneurs.

Getting citizens involved will make Congress pay attention, but not every issue is a SOPA, where the internet shuts down in protest. Most issues fly below the radar. Only an empowered, capable Congress can make decisions on the many issues that will never lead to a Google doodle or Wikipedia shut-down.

A smarter Congress requires an investment in its staff, which will save us grief in the long term. Funding for Congress, with all of its supporting agencies, will amount to 1/10 of 1% of federal spending projected for 2012. Current spending on Congress is also roughly the same order of magnitude of what will be spent on all lobbying efforts this year. While lobbyists are necessary for industries like technology and telecommunications to express their views, if we want good policymaking, we need to empower Congress to be able to make good decisions. Restoring funding to OTA and reexamining congressional staff pay is the most effective place to start.

Update: A just released analysis from the Center for Responsive Politics looking at SOPA and PIPA-related lobbying efforts in the 4th quarter. "Companies that lobbied on the two bills spent at least $104.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, more than double the $49.3 million they laid out in the previous quarter." The number of lobbyists doubled from 462 to 956.

How much money was directly connected to SOPA and PIPA? CRP says "It's impossible to say...  since the reporting forms don't require that level of detail." Overall, businesses identified as computers/internet spent $125 million on lobbying for 2011, compared to $122 million for tv/movies/internet.

The Google Analytics URL Builder is a simple tool that helps you track traffic statistics for specific campaign related links.  The tool works by adding parameters to a link from a page on your site that you then track using Google Analytics.  When running an advertising or social media campaign, this is incredibly handy for tracking your ROI.

I'll walk you through how I used the URL builder for this past Tuesday's Sunlight Live coverage of the State of the Union address.

Below is a screenshot of the URL builder.  In the first field, you enter the main URL you want to track. In this case, I'm watching http://sunlightlive.com. The next few fields determine the "Campaign Source" or the traffic referrer you'd like to watch, the "Campaign Medium," the way in which the traffic referrer is driving to your site, and the "Campaign Name." For Sunlight Live, the source was Facebook, the medium was through an advertisement and the name of the campaign was SOTU-2012.

After entering in this information, click the "Generate URL" button, which will add those parameters to your original link:

http://sunlightlive.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Ads&utm_campaign=SOTU-2012

..Which we then used to direct Facebook ad traffic to the Sunlight Live site. Check out the full entry process below:

To track every medium you use, whether it's Facebook, Reddit, Google+, Delicious or some other site, you'll need to create a unique URL for each.

Once the campaign is over, open your site profile on Google Analytics to access your link statistics.  On the left side navigation, head over to Traffic Sources, then Sources, then Campaigns:

To set the date for the life of the campaign, look in the top right corner. Google Analytics will show you the campaigns for that time period, you'll need to sort them by Source so you can differentiate the sites. Above this list click on Source then Traffic Sources then Source:

Below you'll see the statistics by Source for the Sunlight Live State of the Union campaign over the course of two days. You can see that our Facebook Ads brought in the most traffic by far. (You may also notice I wasn't consistent with my naming conventions for Source -- I need to work on that.) For reference, our Facebook drivers are the Facebook link posted above (top driver) and our fan page (second driver):

Remember, this is only traffic to our Sunlight Live page through tracked links we pushed through social media and advertising. The screenshot below captures all traffic to the page, including both links we promoted and organic links from followers of Sunlight.  The first two links are ads we ran for the campaign, though the Google ads weren't captured in the campaign view (I'm unsure of the reason for that):

While Google Analytics provides plenty of information and site data, using the URL builder makes it much simpler to track the ROI on your campaigns and on your efforts to promote them.  What are your experiences with tracking campaigns? Have any of you used the URL builder tool in the past?

The House of Representatives has released an agenda for its all-day Legislative Data Conference, set for February 2nd. If you are interested in attending, you can RSVP here.

 House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference Agenda

This piece was prepared in collaboration with Ethan Phelps-Goodman.

In the last two decades, finance, insurance, and real estate have made many individuals quite rich, propelling them to stratospheric levels of wealth.

It’s also propelled these individuals into stratospheric levels of political giving. More than any other industry, individuals from the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector, particularly those in securities and investments, are the key drivers of the overall growth of elite donors, or The Political One Percent of the One Percent.

An analysis of campaign contribution records by the Sunlight Foundation reveals that the number of donors in the FIRE sector giving at least $10,000 (in 2010 dollars) per cycle to political candidates, parties, and independent expenditure groups has increased from 1,091 in 1990 to 5,510 in 2010 (a 405% increase). These elite FIRE sector donors’ combined contributions have increased even more dramatically, growing by $162.8 million (a 700% increase, controlling for inflation) to $178.2 million in 2010.

As we detailed last month, individuals spending more than $10,000 on elections now contribute one quarter of all individual campaign contributions – even though they are less than one percent of one percent of the U.S. population. We dubbed these elite donors Political One Percent of the One Percent.

Nowhere, however, has the growth in elite spending been more dramatic than in the finance, insurance, and real estate  sector.

In 1990, 1,091 elite donors in the FIRE sector contributed $15.4 million to campaigns – a substantial sum at the time. But that’s nothing compared to what they contribute today. In 2010, 5,510 elite donors from the sector contributed $178.2 million, more than 10 times the amount they contributed in 1990.

The outsized expansion of the finance sector as a source of major contributions makes some sense, given the increasing wealth of an already wealthy sector.

The financial sector is now 8.4% of the domestic economy, a percentage that has been steadily growing for decades, and is up from about 6% in 1990. But even faster than has been the growth in compensation in the industry. In 1990, industry employees took home $244 billion, according to the U.S. Commerce Department; Compensation in the industry is now almost double the average U.S. compensation, and at one point in the 2000s, the industry accounted for almost 40% of U.S. business profits.

Figures 1 and 2 below detail the changes in absolute dollar contributions since 1990, charting presidential and mid-term election years separately (since presidential years generally have twice the giving, the time trends are easier to see this way). What jumps out in the figures is how dramatically the FIRE sector is leaving everyone else behind. Figures 3 and 4 detail the growth in the number of donors from the FIRE sector as compared to other sectors. Again, we can see them pulling away.

As we can see, the finance sector was always a leading source of campaign funding. But over time, the gap between finance and other industries has grown into a chasm.

In 1990, the next most generous sector, lawyers and law firms, was home to 472 donors contributing $5.7 million (as compared to 1,091 elite donors from the finance sector contributing $15.4 million). By 2010, there were 2,211 elite lawyer donors contributing $59.6 million (as compared to 5,510 elite FIRE donors contributing $178 million)

Put another way, what began as an edge of 619 donors and $9.7 million for finance over law in 1990 grew into an edge of 3,299 donors and $118.4 million by 2010.

None of this is to minimize the increasing contributions by other leading sectors. Lawyers have likewise stepped up in impressive ways, also increasingly distancing themselves from the rest of the pack as key sources of big money. The Communications and Electronics sector has also shown impressive absolute growth in this area, driven largely by high-tech and Hollywood money. But the finance sector towers over everyone else.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

Digging a little deeper into the financial sector reveals that the growth in finance is mostly in the securities and investment part of the sector, followed by real estate. In 1990, 412 of the 1,091 elite donors from the finance industry came from the securities and investment industry, followed by 328 from real estate; by 2010, it was 2,178 from securities and investments, followed by 1,468 from real estate. In 1990, elite donors from securities and investments contributed $6.1 million and elite donors from real estate contributed $4.6 million. In 2010 elite donors from securities and investments contributed $84.0 million, while real estate donors contributed $44.5 million.

Looking at the historical distribution of finance money, it has consistently been bipartisan, going to candidates and committees from both parties, though slightly favoring Republicans in most years. In 2010, the industry gave 54% of its candidate/party money to Republicans. In 2008, 51% of the money went to Democrats.

Figure 5.

Party committees have been the biggest recipients of this money (53% of total contributions in 2010, 76% in 2008), then individual candidates (37% of total contribution in 2010, 21% in 2008) then independent expenditure groups (10% of total contributions  in 2010, 3% in 2008).

Individuals can now give up to $5,000 per candidate ($2,500 in both the primary and the general), to $30,800 to a party committee, and unlimited money to independent expenditure groups such as SuperPACs. Though these big-ticket donors have historically given less to independent groups, there is plenty of room for them to grow their contributions. In 2010, FIRE donors gave a historical high of 10% of their contributions to these independent groups, indicating that they are starting to catch on to their potential.

Less than one percent of one percent of all Americans account for one quarter of all individual campaign donations. These elite donors all contribute at least $10,000 per election cycle, giving money to multiple candidates, party committees, and sometimes independent expenditure groups.

Within this select community of elite donors, individuals who work in the finance industry play a particularly special role. Of the $774 million in individual contributions given by this class of elite donors in 2010, $178 million (23%) came from elite donors in the finance, insurance and real estate sector. Perhaps more importantly, the ranks and total contributions from these donors have grown more dramatically and substantially than any other sector.

Though it’s very difficult to directly measure the influence that finance and other elite donors are having, it seems fair to say that, to the extent that candidates and parties are eager to court these donors, they will want to keep them relatively happy, since they know that without the support of these donors, raising the money needed to compete electorally is more difficult. At the very least, candidates and party leaders will be spending more time with these financial sector donors than anybody else, hearing them out sympathetically on regulation, taxation, and other issues of concern, again and again. At the aggregate level, it's hard to imagine this not having some impact.

Yesterday evening, John reacted to President Obama's SOTU speech in which the President proposed a ban on lobbyists acting as bundlers. He criticized the proposal as "unlikely to pass Congress, and unlikely to pass muster with the courts." It's true that Congress is unlikely to do much of anything for the remainder of this session, although my bet is that the courts would uphold a bundling ban if it were structured properly. Regardless, focusing on banning lobbyist bundlers is to ignore the elephant in the room: we need to fix who is required to register as a lobbyist in the first place .

Were Congress to act in 2012, the best thing it could do is to tighten the requirement of who must register as a lobbyist so that the Newt Gingriches, Tom Daschles, and other hidden influencers will be brought into the sunlight. There's no doubt that they both have lobbied, at least under the common-sense definition of  "influenc[ing] politicians or public officials on a particular issue." The legal definition says essentially the same thing, but it allows lobbyists to evade registration so long as they avoid either spending 20% of their time lobbying or directly contacting more than 1 covered official. This is incredibly easy to do, and creates loopholes that just about everyone agrees should be closed.

So if we're going to talk about lobbying reform -- and a Pew Charitable Trust survey released Monday says 40% of Americans believe that addressing lobbyist influence is a top priority for 2012 -- the best place to start is with fixing the lobbyist registration and disclosure requirements. President Obama has addressed lobbying reform in the past, most visibly in his 2010 State of the Union speech, and his administration's actions have shown sensitivity to the importance of this issue. But he seems to have gotten sidetracked.

A good place to start is with the Lobbying Disclosure Enhancement Act, introduced by Rep. Quigley, which directly takes on the lobbying disclosure loopholes, as well as Sunlight's recommendations on this issue and the ABA Lobbying Task Force's report. For a primer, watch the Advisory Committee on Transparency's event "Washington's Lobbying Fix," which discusses all of these proposals.