lobbyists 0.10

Parse Senate LD-1/LD-2 lobbying disclosure XML documents

This package provides a reference parser and database importer for the United States Senate LD-1/LD-2 lobbying disclosure database. The Senate provides the database as a series of XML documents, downloadable here:

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/Public_Disclosure/database_download.htm

The SQL database schema used by the importer is a direct translation of the XML schema used in the Senate documents. This isn’t a particularly useful format for analyzing lobbying data, but it is useful for analyzing the lobbying records themselves, which often contain errors or anomalies. In any case, it shouldn’t be too difficult to adapt the importing code in this package to a more useful schema.