Does Digital Transparency Lead to Fewer Earmarks?

Will Turnage, a freelance developer working on RepresentedBy, a really cool Facebook application that he is planning to submit to the Sunlight Labs "Apps for America" contest, has uncovered a seemingly suggestive correlation between how "digitally transparent" a Member of Congress is and how much money they are seeking in earmarks in the 2009 economic stimulus package. He writes, "as digital engagement increases, there becomes fewer and fewer legislators who are sponsoring extremely large earmarks." Here's a table summarizing his findings:

Turnage applied the following method to rank legislators by degrees of transparency:

Digitally transparent can mean a lot of things to different people, so in an attempt to quantify that, I’ve developed what I’m calling the DTI, or Digital Transparency Index. This is a number between 0 and 115 that gives you a rough idea of how engaged a legislator is in the digital world.

Legislators are scored on the following criteria:

* 25 points if they have a public facing email address
* 20 points if their website has a valid RSS feed
* 10 bonus points if they’ve posted a news item to their RSS feed in the past week, 5 bonus points if they’ve posted a news item to their RSS feed in the past month
* 20 points if they have an active Twitter account
* 10 bonus points if all of the tweets on their home page are from the past week, 5 bonus points if all of the tweets on their home page are from the past month
* 20 points if they have an active YouTube account
* 10 bonus points if they’ve posted a YouTube video in the past week, 5 bonus points if they’ve posted a YouTube video in the past month

Summing up his findings, he writes, "The sad truth is that Congress isn’t as digitally immersed as a lot of us. Out of 115 possible points, the highest score anyone received was an 85. Worst of all, out of 451 active legislators, 209 of them scored a big fat zero, 161 legislators scored low (meaning an index of 35 or less), and only 81 legislators scored 40 or higher." He also found no significant difference between whether a Member was older or younger, in terms of their digital-ness.

I'd prefer to see the glass as half-full, rather than half-empty. After all, just three years ago if you said the word "blog" around Capitol Hill people looked at you as if you had some kind of contagious disease. Congress and digital transparency is now a moving train, and we should keep track of changes in their adoption curve over the next few years. In addition, we should think about toughening these criteria so they become more meaningful to real engagement with the public. Turnage didn't rank Members by whether they are personally engaged or whether the content they are sharing is all produced by staffers; nor did he count whether they are open to and/or responding to comments (either on Twitter or YouTube, which are both places conducive to two-way engagement). But my hats off to him for grinding out a baseline.

As for the relationship between transparency and earmarks, more research is obviously needed. One needs to filter out the Members who are on the Appropriations committee, because they have a disproportionate role in doling out the pork. It would also be useful to expand the data set to include all earmarks, not just the ones in the 2009 stimulus bill.

By the way, if you want to see where your reps land on Turnage's Digital Transparency Index, check out RepresentedBy on Facebook.

[Full disclosure: I am a senior technology advisor to the Sunlight Foundation, which runs the Sunlight Labs.]