Hi Paul,
I geocoded the most recent OpenSecrets individual contribution files
(00-08) and I posted them online under http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~foley/opensecrets_geocoded/
. The process can be a bit unreliable, but I only populated the
geocoded fields when a good match was found (street name + address
range). The block IDs were pulled directly from the TIGER files, so it
should be more reliable than finding the coordinates and using them to
look up the block IDs.
The format is basically the same as the original files from
OpenSecrets with the addition (at the end of the row) of 3 new
columns: TLID, Side, and BLKID. You probably won't need to use the
TLID or Side columns, but I figured I'd leave them in just in case.
The BLKID field is a concatenation of the state (2 chars), county (2),
tract (6), and block (4) identifiers from the 2000 census. 2000 didn't
have an address field, and 2002 included very few, but for 2004 and
later about 60% could be found. A big part of that is missing address
fields in the original data, though out of the fields with addresses,
about 10% still couldn't be found.
Let me know if the data works for you. I've got the files loaded in a
database, so I can dump them out with other delimiters, etc. pretty
easily.
-Peter Foley
Graduate Student
Caltech HSS Dept
On Sep 28, 2009, at 2:01 PM, Paul Gronke wrote:
> Colleagues
>
> I have a senior writing a thesis who would like to track changing
> patterns of campaign donations. He's interested in replicating and
> extending Michael Malbin's work on how patterns of donations have
> changed over the past few cycles.
>
> I would like him to attach Census demographic information to the FEC
> campaign donations dataset (actually, he's downloaded these from
> open secrets).
>
> I am not familiar with how you attach a Census tract or block
> identifier to an address, and if this can be done in a relatively
> straightforward (and not overly expensive) way. The student is
> fairly adept with Stata but not tremendously so. This is something
> I'm not averse to learning myself, but I am hoping to find an off
> the shelf solution, or perhaps someone that has already done with
> with the 2008, 2004, and 2000 files and might be willing to share a
> dataset.
>
> Thank you
> Paul G.
>
> ---
> Paul Gronke Ph: 503-517-7393
> Professor Fax:
> Reed College
> 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd.
> Portland OR 97202
> http://www.reed.edu/~gronkep
>
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