The data set of contribtions made by individuals to Canada's five major federal political parties from 2004 to 2014 (roughly 2 million records). Contribtuion recrods for those who gave less than $200 total for a given year are anonymous, and therefore are not included. The data was scraped from Elections Canada's website, and pre-processed by a munging script. Beyond cleaning and normalizing the data, the munging script filters out certain types of records (e.g. estate contributions and those with invalid postal codes). See that repo for further details.
The data prcocesing script applied to the above mentioned data, linking together every individual's set of contributions by a common id. Records that have the same postal code, and for which the Jaro-Winkler string distance of the contributor names is greater than or equal to 0.945 are assumed to represent donations from the same person.
The output of the processing script, the data set augmented with a contributor_id column, identifying unique contributors across records.
- The source and outut data sets are split over a number of files – organized by party and year – for the sake of portability (files over 100MB cannot be pushed to GitHub). To concatenate the data into a single CSV file run the script R/manage_csvs/concatenate_csvs.R.
Random samples of the output, linked data set were manually reviewed to infer two guiding statistics about the accuracy of the links. The following claims are 99% accurate:
- For every 100 postal codes, less than 5 include any donations by the same contributor that failed to be linked.
- For every 100 contributors, less than 5 include misassigned donations, that is, records that were attributed to their contributor_id, but should not have been.
- There are two sources of error in the linking process that are not possible to account for: donations made by different contributors with the same name, from the same postal code (e.g. a father and son) will be linked, whereas donations from a single contributor made from different postal codes (e.g. before and after moving house) wont be linked.
Since the per-vote subsidy was cancelled in recent years, Canadian federal political parties are principally financed by donations from individual citizens. Only a small proportion of the population gives (less than 2%), and in turn decides how a vast amount of public money (~$46 million in 2009), through tax credits, is distributed among the parties.