This quote is from the December 21, 2008 blog posting by Baker, Dean, economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, available at <http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press> (last visited July 19, 2013).+(last+visited+July+19,+2013).>Google Scholar

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For example, published lists have pharmaceutical manufacturers donating over $21 million to candidates, political parties, and outside spending organizations. This figure likely underestimates total money in two ways. First, transactions to state-level, party committees may not be included. This money should be included in any partisan breakdown, since the fund-raising prowess of these party committees follows a four-year, presidential cycle. Second, the method of aggregating transactions into economic industries should be more precise. With each transaction over $200, the individual donor must list an employer. Published industry codes of campaign finance records use the given employer to aggregate into industry-level analysis; however, it is common for an individual to give multiple transactions, with each employer listing having spelling errors, or worse. In 2012, just over $1.1 billion of transactions had no identifiable employer (including retired donors), which was 27 percent of the total. Unless this percentage is lowered, all counts of industry donations will underestimate the true total. After standardizing the employer for each individual donor, and including all donations to state-level party committees, I found nearly $9 million more donations from pharmaceutical manufacturers in 2012. The differences in total money and partisan split, after utilizing new data management techniques on the 2012 electoral-cycle data, brings to light many of the empirical problems facing the study of pharmaceutical politics.Google Scholar

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