LittleSis

Connects the dots between influential / wealthy individuals in (mostly US) politics and business.

URL

https://littlesis.org/database

Description

LittleSis is a database that houses information from a range of online sources on powerful individuals and organisations in the public and private sectors in the Unites States. It seeks to show the relationships between those individuals and organisations, with the aim of helping users to track relationships (e.g. donations to politicians and political action committees, also called PACs, and board memberships). The goal is to help the user to follow the money and discover connections between those that hold public and private sector power.

According to their website, LittleSis includes data from "government filings, news articles, and other reputable sources". It is maintained through automatic updates and manual edits. Links to data sources are provided.

If you search for keywords via the search box (circled in green) at the top of the LittleSis main website, you'll get LittleSis news articles:

Search results from the LittleSis main website

LittleSis' main offering is their database - to access it, click 'Database' in the top menu. You'll get to the main database page:

The home page for the LittleSis database

When you search the database, you'll get entities that match your search term(s), and network maps that include the search term(s):

An example of a results page based on a search of the LittleSis database

When you click on an entity name in the search results above, you'll see a person's or company/organisation page. Here is a person page:

A person's page with data housed in LittleSis.

The person page has links to a wide range of relationships that the person has (for which LittleSis has data). The types of relationships in the example above include business positions, board memberships, positions, federal election campaign contributions, universities attended, holdings (companies in which they have ownership), family, and others.

The 'Interlocks' tab lists people with positions in the same organisations as the person you searched - this can help you see the networks of people with whom they are associated. The 'Giving' tab lists people who also received donations from organisations and people to whom the person donated:

The 'Giving' tab lists donors who also donated to orgs and people to whom Hunter Biden donated

The 'Data' tab allows you to filter and search the person's relationships. For instance, here are the lobbying firms in which Hunter Biden holds current or past positions:

Example of a search on Hunter Biden's data tab

Here's an example of an organisation's page:

An organisation's page on LittleSis

An organisation page has the same kinds of information as a person's page.

LittleSis includes 'network maps' for all entities (people and organisations):

A network map for Donald Trump

Access the network maps from a person's or organisation's search results page. The map will show you relationships that illustrate the topic of the map like donations (e.g. in the map above, Henry R Kravis donated US$1 million to Trump's inauguration). You can create your own maps, but you need to be registered to do that. (To create a map, log in and go to Add>Map.)

LittleSis data is searchable online, can be accessed through an API, and can be downloaded as JSON files.

Cost

• Free

• Partially Free

• Paid

Level of difficulty

Requirements

You have to sign up with an e-mail address to use some features of LittleSis. (It's free.)

Limitations

It's not clear what criteria are used to determine whether data should be included in LittleSis or not. The database is focused on the United States.

Ethical Considerations

-

Guide

LittleSis: Help on their database. It's worth using this if you are new to LittleSis, especially the 'Intro to the LittleSis Database' video.

LittleSis: Map the Power Toolkit

Public Accountancy Initiative: How to Use the LittleSis.org database

Tool provider

The Public Accountability Initiative, U.S.

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Page maintainer
Katherine de Tolly