Methodology

The question

For one member of Congress and one industry: do they take an unusually large share of that industry’s money and vote its way unusually often? Both halves matter, and the word doing the work is unusually — unusual compared with whom.

Why the comparison group is the whole design

Industry votes in Congress split on party almost perfectly. Measured across the 119th Congress, the mean absolute gap between the two parties’ rates of voting the industry-favoured way is 0.97, and the median is 1.00. On one real roll call the oil-and-gas-favoured vote rate is 3% of Democrats and 100% of Republicans.

Score that raw and the result ranks legislators by party and home state, then calls the ranking corruption. So each member is compared only against a peer group: the same chamber, the same party, and the same third of that party by DW-NOMINATE first dimension, the standard scholarly measure of legislative ideology. A moderate Republican is measured against moderate Republicans.

The effect is measurable. On the published output, the gap between the parties’ mean strongest alignment is 0.16 standard deviations, against roughly two for the unadjusted rate. The index is no longer a restatement of party. That property is asserted as a test in the pipeline, so it fails loudly if a future change reintroduces the collinearity.

The two measures

Money

Direct contributions from an industry’s PACs to the member, expressed as a share of all industry-attributed money that member received. A share rather than a dollar total, so that prolific fundraisers are not ranked as captured by construction. Contributions are attributed to industries through the sponsoring organisation recorded in the FEC committee master file; money from leadership PACs and joint fundraising committees is politician-to-politician and carries no industry position, so it is excluded.

Votes

The share of roll calls where the member voted the industry-favoured way, weighted by informativeness: the largest share of any party that broke ranks on that roll call. A vote where a party moved as a bloc has a weight near zero and moves nobody, because inside a peer group it is a constant and cannot distinguish any two members of it.

Which side an industry is on is decided per measure, not per subject area, and recorded with a written reason. A vote to table or to recommit inverts: a yes there kills the question, so the industry-favoured vote is the opposite of what it would be on passage. That composition is done once, in the pipeline, rather than left to each consumer to redo.

Combining them

Both measures are converted to standard deviations from the peer-group mean. The index is their geometric mean, and it is counted only where both are positive.

That gate is the substantive claim. Unusual money with ordinary voting is not alignment. Unusual voting with ordinary money is a conviction, not a transaction. Only the conjunction of the two supports what this site says, so only the conjunction produces a number. It is a demanding test: 176 of the 404 measured officials clear it in no industry at all.

Where nothing is published

A member-industry pair must clear every one of these before it appears:

Below any of them the page reads not measured and shows nothing — not a zero. Absent evidence and evidence of absence are different claims, and a zero would blur them. 143 of the 547 sitting officials are in this state. They also sort to the end of the list in both directions, rather than being ordered as though they had scored badly.

Sources

All four are public and none requires an API key. The intermediate data this site consumes is published as JSON at congressvotetracker.org/data/, so the inputs can be checked independently of the output.

Known limitations

Outside spending is not scored. About 95% of independent-expenditure money cannot be attributed to an industry at all, because super PACs are named to conceal their backers. It is reported separately in the money data and excluded here rather than guessed at.

Direction calls are machine-assigned. Which side of a bill an industry is on is assigned by a language model, with the reasoning published for every call, including every case where no call could be made, and with no human sign-off. Low-confidence calls never score. These are ordinary data in a version-controlled file, and a correction is a commit.

The vote half is thinner than the money half. 43% of the industry-attributed roll calls have both parties above 98% unified, so they carry no within-party information and drop out after the peer adjustment. The industries where alignment is measurable at all are the ones with genuine intra-party fights.

Small dollar figures can produce large residuals. Roughly 4% of published pairs rest on under $10,000. They clear the floor but sit beside pairs backed by six figures, so every figure on the site shows its dollars and its roll-call count next to it. Read those, not just the index.

Coverage is a moment, not a verdict. The index covers the 119th Congress. A member with no number may simply not have cast enough measurable votes yet.

What the index does not mean

Corrections

If you are a public official listed here, or anyone else, and believe a figure or a direction call is wrong, contact AXIA Enterprises with the specifics. The direction calls are published as reviewable data precisely so that they can be challenged.

The game is separate

PAC-MONEY™ is a maze arcade game attached to this site and is pure satire. Every donor corporation in it is a parody company that does not exist, dealt to each player at random; the dollar figures are invented; no real company is depicted. Nothing in the game feeds the index and nothing in it is a claim about anybody.

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