The Corruption
Detector™

How the index is calculated

For every member of Congress and every industry, two quantities are measured. The first is how much of that industry’s money they take, as a share of all the industry money they receive — a share rather than a dollar figure, so that prolific fundraisers do not come out looking captured simply for raising a lot. The second is how often they vote the way that industry wants, weighted so that a roll call the whole party took the same way counts for nothing.

Both are then compared against a peer group: the same chamber, the same party and the same third of that party by DW-NOMINATE, the standard measure of legislative ideology. A moderate Republican is measured against moderate Republicans. This is not a refinement — it is the reason the number means anything. Industry votes in Congress split on party almost perfectly, and without the peer adjustment the index would separate the parties by roughly two standard deviations. With it, the gap is a small fraction of a standard deviation; the current figure is published at /methodology.

A number is published only where a member is above their peer group on both measures at once. Unusual money with ordinary voting is not alignment. Unusual voting with ordinary money is a conviction rather than a transaction. Only the conjunction of the two supports the claim this site makes, so only the conjunction is counted.

Where a number is not shown

A member-industry pair must clear four floors before it is published: at least four informative roll calls, one full point of vote weight, $5,000 of tracked industry money, and a peer group of at least twelve. Below any of those the page says not measured and shows nothing. Absent evidence is not evidence of absence, and a zero would blur the two.

Many members who clear the floors somewhere show no alignment in any industry at all — a genuine finding, displayed as one rather than hidden.

What this is not

Known limitations

Only direct PAC contributions are scored. About 95% of independent-expenditure money cannot be attributed to any industry, because super PACs are named to conceal their backers, so it is excluded rather than guessed at. Which side of a bill an industry is on is assigned by a language model with the reasoning published per call and no human sign-off; those calls are open to correction. And 43% of the industry-attributed vote record carries no within-party variation at all, which is why the vote half is thinner than the money half. The full method, including every threshold and every source, is at /methodology.

The arcade game is satire

PAC-MONEY™ is a maze arcade game bolted onto this site, and it is the one part of it that is pure comedy. You pick any of the 547 officials, their portrait becomes the chomping head, and you clear a maze of dollar signs while four lobbyists chase you.

The donor corporations in the game — OmniPetro Global, Pharmalgamated, Vaultbank Capital, Apex Correctional Group and the rest — are parody companies that do not exist. They are dealt to each player by a dice roll, they are not anybody’s donors, the dollar figures are invented, and no real company is depicted anywhere in the game. None of it feeds the index and none of it is a claim about anyone.