My research
started out as a freshman writing seminar project for the Honors College. Back
in Fall 2013, when it looked like the U.S. might launch airstrikes against the
Assad regime in Syria, this study came out showing Senators who voted to
authorize strikes received far more campaign contributions from the defense
industry than those who voted against strikes. I wondered how you could prove
contributions made a legislator more favorable toward the defense industry,
rather than defense companies contributing to candidates who already supported
them. It turns out that’s a really complicated question. But since defense
companies are some of the largest corporate donors on both sides of the aisle,
and because we spend so much on defense, if campaign financing creates systemic
legislative corruption, that’s a pretty big problem.
I’m really
passionate about using data to make life better for people. Since starting work
on this project, I’ve become more interested in good-government advocacy and
election law, and now I’m planning on going to law school or grad school to get
a degree in this field. It would be great if this project gets published, but
even if it doesn’t, I still have the experience of in-depth statistical,
legislative, and legal research.
My workload
varies a lot based on my schedule. Since I’m not collecting data at specific
time points or conducting lab work, it’s a little bit different of an
experience from some of the hard science projects. So, for example, a lot of
the work before Spring Break was experimental design and researching
congressional voting activity on defense-related issues from 2003-2015. I
created an original dataset for this project, so I stayed at Mason over Spring
Break and worked on that – it took me around a week to put in about 14,000 data
points. Now, I’m working on some final statistical work and results.
The average proportion
of a Representative’s campaign contributions originating from the defense
industry has approximately tripled since 2002.
