Political Nonprofits

Nonprofits with 527 status are primarily established to “influence the selection, nomination, election, appointment or defeat of candidates to federal, state or local public office.” In the post–Citizen's United era, where powerful interest groups are seeking new ways to assert political influence, data related to these political nonprofits have become more important than ever.

Political action committees often emerge when nonprofits, typically incorporated with 501(c)(4) status (as opposed to 501(c)(3) charities), apply for 527 status. This application process is documented in forms such as completing Form 8871. POL-ORGS-FM-8871 and POL-ORGS-SCHED-D, POL-ORGS-SCHED-E, and POL-ORGS-SCHED-R all contain metadata and disclosures from the application process. These documents are static files describing the characteristics of these organizations.

Once recognized, these political nonprofits are required to continue filing IRS 990 forms, similar to typical nonprofits. But they are also required to submit Form 8872 disclosures which are described in tables like POL-ORGS-FM-8872, POL-ORGS-SCHED-A, and POL-ORGS-SCHED-B.

The IRS regularly releases data on PAC activities, as documented in Forms 8871 and 8872. Unfortunately, the data are released in complicated ASCII formats. These files can be challenging to work with because of mixed data types within rows and occasionally data irregularities that break the ASCII structure. To make these data available to the sector, Jesse Lecy has developed a parser to transform these raw files into well-structured tables.

Usage

# 2023-05-POL-ORGS-FM-8871.csv  >>  organization details
# 2023-05-POL-ORGS-SCHED-D.csv  >>  director and officer information
# 2023-05-POL-ORGS-SCHED-E.csv  >>  election authority IDs 
# 2023-05-POL-ORGS-SCHED-R.csv  >>  related entities records

# 2023-05-POL-ORGS-FM-8872.csv  >>  required annual disclosures 
# 2023-05-POL-ORGS-SCHED-A.csv  >>  individual donations
# 2023-05-POL-ORGS-SCHED-B.csv  >>  organizational donations 


###
###   DATA PREVIEW
###

library( dplyr )
library( kableExtra )

FILENAME <- "2023-05-POL-ORGS-FM-8871.csv"
BASE.URL <- "https://nccsdata.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/public/pac/"
d <- read.csv( paste0( BASE.URL, FILENAME ) )

keep <- c( )

k <- 
  d %>%
  select( ORGANIZATION_NAME, EIN, PURPOSE ) %>% 
  head() %>%  
  kable( format="html" ) %>%
  kable_material_dark()
ORGANIZATION_NAME EIN PURPOSE
Dan Swecker for Senate Campaign 912121950 Tax exempt political organization - Political campaign
FRIENDS OF TOM CALDERON 954857244 RAISE FUNDS TO ELECT CANDIDATE
ASGM PAC 61596525 POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE TO PROMOTE LEGISLATION FAVORABLE TO WORKERS COMPENSATION SAFETY GROUPS IN NEW YORK STATE.
Comm to Elect Judge Robert Ross to Supreme Court 113601603 Committe to Elect Judge Robert Ross to the Supreme Court of the State of New York
CAMPAIGN TO RE ELECT BOB MC CASLIN 912082049 SENATORIAL RE ELECTION CAMPAIGN
Rosanne Bader for Mt. SAC School Board 330963550 Promoting and fundraising for candidate for election to office


Background

For more information on 527 political organizations and other types of political activity in the nonprofit sector check out the following resources:
LINK Bolder Advocacy's useful taxonomy: "Comparison of 501(c)(3)s, 501(c)(4)s, and Political 527 Organizations"
LINK Post, M. A., Boris, E. T., & Stimmel, C. L. (2023). The advocacy universe: A methodology to identify politically active 501 (c)(4) organizations. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 52(1), 260-274. https://doi.org/10.1177/08997640211066495.
LINK Post, M. A., & Boris, E. T. (2022, December). Nonprofit Political Engagement: The Roles of 501 (c)(4) Social Welfare Organizations in Elections and Policymaking. In Nonprofit Policy Forum (Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 131-155).https://doi.org/10.1515/npf-2021-0061.
LINK Bolder Advocacy's excellent guide for nonprofits: The Connection: Strategies for Creating and Operating 501(c)(3)s, 501(c)(4)s, and Political Organizations
REPLICATION FILES Han, B., Ho, B., & Xia, Z. (2023). Political ideology of nonprofit organizations. Social Science Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.13309.
REPLICATION FILES Lecy, J. D., Ashley, S. R., & Santamarina, F. J. (2019). Do nonprofit missions vary by the political ideology of supporting communities? Some preliminary results. Public Performance & Management Review, 42(1), 115-141.https://doi.org/10.1080/15309576.2018.1526092




More Datasets

Business Master File (BMF)

All active organizations that have been granted nonprofit status by the IRS.

BMF sample-framework metadata

SOI Exempt Organizations Microdata

The statistics of nonprofit charitable and other tax-exempt organizations produced by the Statistics of Income (SOI) Division.

990 SOI sampling 990