individual monetary

contributions in
nyc citywide campaigns
lexie lehmann
introduction to gis methods
spring 2018
context
new york city’s matching funds program
- nyc’s landmark small-dollar public matching funds program helps
candidates rely on city residents —not special interests— to fund their
campaigns
- the program matches small contributions from city residents at a $6 to $1
rate. candidates must opt-in to the program and can receive up to $1,050
in public funds per eligible contributor.

my research question(s):
how is the distribution does the matching funds

01 of campaign contributions 02 program disproportionately

spatialized throughout nyc? affect certain zip code
regions?
data
i mainly used two types of data:
donation excel sheet zip code shape file

01 a list of individual, monetary donations

made directly to all candidates in three
02 a shape file of zip code tracts

city-wide races (Mayor, City Council,

Borough Presidents) in 2017 and 2001

to clean up the data:

i eliminated fields that were not pertinent to my research, keeping only the following fields: ELECTION
YEAR, ZIP CODE, AMOUNT, MATCH AMOUNT, and PREV AMOUNT
methodology
for each contribution map, i geocoded my list of individual donations for each election using a single field (ZIP). next, i performed a spatial join with the
individual donations shape file and the zip code shape file; as a merge rule, I summed the count, total amount, match amount, and previous amount of
contributions for each zip code. finally, i displayed the symbology for the amount and count of donations per zip code, and then mapped the dot density of
the donation amounts for the election.

1. geocode 2. spatial join 3. symbology

2017 Mayoral
Campaign Contributions
(Donation Amount)
results & analysis
it is difficult to make generalizations across elections
there seemed to be a lot of difference in scale when comparing between city council, borough president, and
mayoral elections. even in the comparison maps, it became difficult to generalize across the broad range of
donation amounts.

some of it is intuitive: wealthier areas give more money,

people give more money during particularly contentious election cycles
a lot of my findings were what I expected, however I was pleasantly surprised that the campaign match
program was pretty evenly distributed throughout the 5 boroughs. that said, the program does
disproportionately benefit city council candidates, who are likely more apt to opt into the program.

this data has a lot of potential

with more time and more data sets, I think that there is a lot of interesting information in this data about who
donates, how much, and in what way (in kind versus monetary versus something else). I’d be very interested
to see more scholarship done on campaign finance distributions and programs like nyc’s matching funds
program.
next steps
compare voter turnouts with donation amounts compare donation activity across party lines

perform the same analysis with corporate donations conduct a more in-depth literature review on the
rather than individual ones efficacy of the campaign match program

use a more specific locator than zip codes contrast campaign financing with campaign
outcomes, or campaign financing with campaign
spending
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