About Poliscope
Follow the money. Understand the power.
What is Poliscope?
Poliscope is a political data aggregation platform that unifies campaign finance, lobbying disclosures, government contracts, SEC filings, and congressional records into a single searchable interface. Our goal is to make it easy for journalists, researchers, and everyday citizens to follow the flow of money through American politics.
Unlike any single government data source, Poliscope cross-links entities across all five domains. A single company profile can show its campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures, government contracts received, and SEC insider trading activity -- all in one view. This kind of cross-referencing is typically only available to well-funded research organizations or investigative newsrooms.
All data on Poliscope comes from public government records and filings. There is no paywall. We believe that transparency data should be accessible to everyone, not just those who can afford premium subscriptions.
Data Sources
FEC
Federal Election Commission
Individual contribution records, candidate and committee filings, independent expenditures, and party/PAC transactions.
Source: FEC bulk data downloads
Coverage: 2000–2024
LDA
Lobbying Disclosure Act
Federal lobbying registrations and quarterly activity reports, including client spending, lobbying firms, and issue areas.
Source: Senate Office of Public Records
Coverage: 1999–2024
USAspending
Federal Contract Awards
Federal contract awards across all agencies, including recipient organizations, award amounts, and contracting details.
Source: USAspending.gov (U.S. Treasury)
Coverage: All historical
Congress.gov
Congressional Data
Bills, resolutions, sponsorship records, legislator profiles, committee assignments, and roll call votes.
Source: Congress.gov API + GovInfo BILLSTATUS XML
Coverage: Congress 108–118
SEC EDGAR
Securities & Exchange Commission
Insider transactions (Form 4) and beneficial ownership filings from publicly traded companies and their officers.
Source: SEC EDGAR
Coverage: Active filers
GLEIF
Global Legal Entity Identifiers
Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) codes for global organizations, enabling precise entity identification and relationship mapping.
Source: Global LEI Foundation
Coverage: Global
Methodology
Entity Resolution
The same person or organization can appear under different names across different government databases. Poliscope uses phonetic blocking, name similarity scoring, and multi-signal corroboration (employer, city, state) to match entities across sources. Our pipeline has generated 29M match candidates, of which 8M have been auto-approved based on high-confidence signals. Remaining candidates are available for manual review.
Influence Scoring
Each entity receives a multi-dimensional influence score that combines contribution volume, lobbying expenditures, government contract awards, and network connectivity. This score is designed to surface entities with outsized political influence across multiple channels, not just campaign donations.
Data Freshness
Data is loaded directly from primary government sources. FEC bulk files cover through the 2024-12-31 filing period. Lobbying disclosure, congressional, and contract data are updated from their respective primary sources on a regular basis.
What Makes Poliscope Different
- --Unified entity profiles across 5 data sources. Most platforms only show campaign finance. Poliscope links contributions, lobbying, contracts, SEC filings, and congressional activity into a single entity view.
- --47.3M government contracts. Federal contract awards are integrated alongside political finance data, making it possible to see who receives taxpayer dollars and who they donate to.
- --Connection finder. Graph-based path-finding between any two entities in the database, surfacing the shortest chain of financial relationships.
- --No paywall on donor lookup. Other platforms limit free searches or require paid subscriptions to view individual donor records. Poliscope is free for all searches.
- --Developer API. All data is accessible via an API with free and paid tiers, enabling researchers and journalists to build their own tools and analyses on top of Poliscope data.
Built by Lab 1908 LLC
Questions or feedback? hello@poliscope.org