Most political action committees are lit- erally - big business. In our case, the best way to make use of PAC data is "joining" - that is, using a computer to match up material in separate data files. Staff Writer Noel Oman alerted us that for the first time, the Arkansas secretary of state's office could provide electronic data for PAC contributions. The General Assembly was in session - perfect timing for a story.
The result was a fairly quick-hit story, written by Oman and accompanied by graphics, for Arkansas Democrat-Gazette readers with more details than ever reported about PAC contributions to Arkansas lawmakers. Free data But we needed more information. We obtained data kept by legislative staff, including information on lawmakers and their committee assignments. To their credit, both arms of state government - the secretary of state's office with PAC data and the Arkansas Bureau of Legislative Research with lawmaker information - had no problem handing over the data tables on diskettes.
Cost: nothing. Getting the files was just the beginning. We had to put things together, wanting to accomplish several things. First, we wanted to identify the biggest PAC contributors, so we asked Visual FoxPro to show a total of contributions from each PAC. Instantly, we saw the biggest players. We also examined the top recipients. Thanks to Oman's experience and an electronic file from the secretary of state's office, we could identify PACs related to one another, representing the same companies or business interests.
Now the fun began: trying to match up lawmakers who got PAC money and their committee assignments. This year's legislative session had issues including electric utility deregulation, telemarketing restrictions and highway spending and tax plans. So we wanted to look at both contributors and recipients on key committees. Matching PACS to committees Here's a list of things we did: First, in both PAC data and legislative membership data, we broke the files in two, creating separate files for each legislative chamber.
Why? Because we planned later to match PAC contributions with committee membership tables, using two factors to make the match: the lawmaker's last name and the district number the lawmaker represents. In just a few cases, Senate and House members might have the same district number and the same last name. Say, Rep. Brown and Sen. Brown with identical district numbers, even though they serve in different chambers.
We obtained data kept by legislative staff, including information on lawmakers and their committee assignments .both arms of state government ... had no problem handing over the data tables on diskettes. That gave us a list showing how much PAC money legislative committee members received. With those files, we could easily pull up, examine and analyze contributions from various PACs to specific committee members.
One caveat for this file that we had to observe: the contributions were repeated, because lawmakers had more than one committee assignment. But since for this file we wanted to break contributions down by committee, it's exactly what we needed. We used the previous files for looking at lawmaker PAC contributions overall. The results We found the usual "suspects" and no hidden skeletons. However, Oman's reporting, accompanied by graphics, did inform and educate readers.
Here's a clip: Bob Balhorn sat in the audience last Wednesday when the House Insurance and Commerce Committee took up a bill to enable Arkansans to ban telemarketing calls to their homes. His was not just another face in the crowd. Balhorn, 63, of Little Rock is executive vice president of the Arkansas Realtors Association, the state affiliate of the National Association of Realtors. It is a post he has held since 1985, a tenure that covers eight regular sessions of the Arkansas General Assembly.
Before that, the native Texan held a similar post in South Dakota, where he also sold real estate. His association, 6,000 members strong, does not immediately come to mind when the most powerful special interests at the state Capitol are assessed. But in the 1998 elections, no other single trade organization or corporation gave more to candidates for state office in Arkansas, according to an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette review of political action committee reports at the Secretary of State's office.
The two committees registered to the association gave $78,800 to candidates for state offices in 1998. Of the total, $72,800 went to legislative candidates, the given to legislative office-seekers by any state-registered political action committee. The association's generosity in 1998 was no anomaly. In the 1996 election, the Realtors' association gave $63,350 to sitting lawmakers, second only to the nursing home industry, which reported giving $84,450.
The nursing home industry's state umbrella organization, the Arkansas Health Care Association, reported giving $57,000 in 1998. And for a plus, we placed the PAC contribution file on our intranet, The Source, so all our editors and reporters could easily look up contributions for state candidates from the 1998 campaign season. Jeff Porter can be reached by e-mail at jporter@ardemgaz.com