Sunlight Labs

WhoPaidThem aims to challenge our individual and collective preconceptions about political funding through a series of interactive graphics.

As an alternative to showing visualizations of funding data, WhoPaidThem presents a series of graphs and lists that invite people to make educated guesses about how funding is distributed, then compare their guesses with reality. The guess/answer comparisons ask questions about our perceptions of funding. For example, given a graph showing the amounts that the most "generous" industries contributed to a candidate, can people correctly rank the top contributors? Or, given a specific industry, can people guess the balance of that industry's funding to Democrats and Republicans? Finally, for a single industry, how well do people understand the magnitude of dollar amounts that industry lobbyists spent last year to promote their causes?

By raising questions like these, WhoPaidThem aims to challenge our individual and collective preconceptions about political funding.