December 17, 2008
Research for Rookies
What exactly is political research? While at times thought of as a mysterious, secretive practice, political research is a fairly basic process.
There are two essential components to political research: data collection and data analysis. Data collection involves obtaining public records. This entails assembling campaign finance data, voting records, legal documents and any other relevant information available to the public. Anyone who has attempted to retrieve documents from government agencies can understand that this task is not the easiest. Perhaps even more important than collecting the data is the process of analyzing the information. How a Congressman voted on an issue is irrelevant unless one can boil down the issue to its essential element and understand who is impacted and why it is important. It is the job of researchers to go through hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages of documents to find what is actually relevant. It is this process of political research that constitutes the core of the profession and its underlying usefulness to campaigns.
An example of this process would be if a candidate received $100,000 in contributions from health professionals and then voted for a controversial tort reform bill. Individually both pieces of information seem unimportant, but combined it opens the possibility for an attack. This connection involves not only amassing data, but calculating campaign finance totals by industry and the making a connection with different sources of information.
While anyone can send out a FOIA request or go online and find campaign finance data, few can systematically analyze the information and tell you what it means and why it is important. This is what political research is all about.
Posted on December 17 at 10:22 AM