Campaign Funding Searches

1
Campaign Funding Searches

• A responsive democratic system requires
  transparent governance
• Political representatives and appointees must be
  free from influence
• No quid pro quo
• Maintaining transparency is a recurrent issue

2
Campaign Funding Searches

• Political campaigns expenses
• 5, 000 to 30,000 for local campaigns
• Millions for state and national campaigns
• Politicians rarely have the personal wealth to
  fund these campaigns
• Funding through campaign contributions is
  required

3
Campaign Funding Searches

• Campaign contributions
• Tightly controlled through a variety of federal,
  state and local laws
• Transparency
• Campaign contributions visible to all
• The public
• The fourth estate
• Other candidates
• Legal reporting requirements
• Contributions over 2,000

4
Campaign Funding Searches

• Two commonly used systems for campaign funding
  information
• Center for Responsive Politics
• Federal Elections Commission
• This project will compare the function of these
  two systems

5
Campaign Funding Searches

• Key performance factors measured
• Subjects from a variety of backgrounds
• Results analyzed

6
Campaign Funding Searches

• Key performance factors
• Elapsed search time
• Accuracy
• User satisfaction

7
Campaign Funding Searches

• Elapsed search time
• Time extending from the start of the search, when
  the user indicates their search parameters, to
  the point at which the user has received an answer

8
Campaign Funding Searches

• Accuracy
• An objective measure of how well the system
  satisfied the user's search (as differentiated
  from the user's satisfaction score)

9
Campaign Funding Searches

• User satisfaction
• Subjective measure of user's satisfaction with
  the search process
• Based on post-test survey

10
Campaign Funding Searches

• Pre-Search Survey
• Will be used to determine a base level of
  political knowledge and searching ability
• Includes both subjective and objective measures

11
Campaign Funding Searches

• Test parameters
• Two U. S. House of Representative races
• Two U. S. Senate races
• Subject is assigned search task
• Subject is observed conducting the search on two
  systems (web sites)
• w.opensecrets.org
• w.fec.gov

12
Campaign Funding Searches

• An inverse relationship between elapsed time and
  user satisfaction
• A direct relationship between accuracy and user
  satisfaction
• A direct relationship between performance and
  user satisfaction

13
Campaign Funding Searches

• Relations
• A accuracy
• P performance
• T elapsed time
• U user satisfaction
• S user search skills
• P ( (U/T) A) S

14
Campaign Funding Searches

• Test questions
• Please find what industries gave the most money
  to Arlen Specter in the 2004 Pennsylvania Senate
  Race.
• Please find what industries gave the most money
  to Nancy Pelosi in the House Race.

15
Campaign Funding Searches

• Test Questions (cont.)
• Please list at least 3 PACs that donated to each
  of the above campaigns.
• What percentage of total campaign for the two
  campaigns came from individual contributors?
• What are the limits that a PAC or an individual
  can contribute to an individual campaign?

16
Campaign Funding Searches

• FINDINGS
• The preliminary results show that the ability of
  the users, defined here as knowledge of politics,
  as well as, the ability to search the web have
  the most important effect on the results (as
  measured by performance).
• The second most important effect is the system
  used. Finally, there seems to little effect of
  the task on the results.

17
Campaign Funding Searches
18
Campaign Funding Searches

• Preliminary Bibliography
• Belkin, N. J. and Marchetti, P. G. (1990).
  Determining the functionality features of an
  intelligent interface to an information retrieval
  system. Proceedings of the 13th annual
  international ACM SIGIR conference on Research
  and development in information retrieval,
  151-177.
• Mulhem, P. and Nigay, L. (1996). Interactive
  information retrieval systems from user centered
  interface design to software design . Proceedings
  of the 19th annual international ACM SIGIR
  conference on Research and development in
  information retrieval, 326-334.
• The Center for Responsive Politics. Your Guide
  to Money in Elections downloaded on 3/22/2005
  from http//www.opensecrets.org/
• Index of Active Rule Makings. downloaded on
  3/18/2005 from http//www.fecwatch.org/law/regula
  tions/activeruleintro.asp
• Campaign Finance Laws downloaded on 3/18 from
  http//www.fec.gov/law/feca/feca.shtml
• Kobayashi, M, and Takeda, K. (2000). Information
  retrieval on the web. ACM Computing Surveys, 32
  (2).