Amarel Supercomputer Drives Research Into Campaign Funding and Gender

Researchers from Rutgers' Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) and the Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC) have teamed up to analyze patterns in gender and campaign finance across state and congressional elections to provide a window into who has a voice in politics.

The Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 report, led by CAWP senior scholar Kira Sanbonmatsu, shines a spotlight on the under-representation of women as donors to political candidates and helps to fulfill CAWP’s mission to study and promote women’s political participation.

“One of the early findings in our research project shows that women are providing less in total contributions to congressional candidates compared to men,” said Sanbonmatsu. “When men out-give women in campaign contributions, this means that women’s voices are less likely to be heard in American politics.”

With the help of OARC’s Amarel supercomputer, the research process has been more efficient and computationally faster than previous efforts. Sanbonmatsu has been working alongside CAWP research associate Shikshya Adhikari and OARC senior scientist Travis Williams on the project.

“We turned to the Amarel supercomputer in order to improve the processing time for our analyses, and Travis Williams from OARC has played an important role in helping us automate our research,” said Sanbonmatsu. “He developed code to accurately match large databases with campaign finance data, something that could not be done on our regular office computers.”

Williams' role in the project involves the challenging task of matching candidate names across various databases, and this effort has been complicated by the frequent use of nicknames, maiden names, and middle names in data. To streamline this process, Williams wrote a script on Amarel using the Python programming language that links candidate names and identifies any unmatched entries.

Prior to starting the project, Sanbonmatsu and Adhikari had never used Amarel. However, with the assistance of OARC scientists like Williams, they are now regularly utilizing the supercomputer to advance their ongoing research projects.

“Amarel is an amazing resource available to researchers at Rutgers, and I think more individuals should take advantage of it,” said Adhikari. “OARC also organized trainings and provided presentations that have been a helpful resource for us to refer back to during this research journey.”

Sanbonmatsu’s research project is a preliminary analysis of donor demographics in political fundraising and offers a live and interactive examination of campaign contributions by both men and women across 10 key focus states. Additional factors such as race/ethnicity, party affiliation, and level of office are also being examined as election data continues to roll in.

This summer, a larger goal will be to expand congressional election research to all states, and the researchers will update the website periodically as new campaign finance data becomes available.

Individuals can view the research interactively through “The State View” and “Donor Gaps” pages, which both highlight specific analyses of the report. “The National View,” which will highlight congressional elections across all 50 states, is expected to be released in August.

For additional information on CAWP or the Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 report, please visit the CAWP website.