Money in politics: how do political parties spend their campaign war chests?

This is the codebase for DISCUS Hackathon event.

Challenge

Create a system to classify data spending of political parties with pdf invoices as inputs.

Data

The Electoral Commision

Expected Outcome

On what services is money spent at elections? This is primary question behind this project. We know that just over £50 million was spent at the last general election, but strikingly little about how. Parties have to report their spending to the Electoral Commission under broad categories (e.g. ‘advertising’ and ‘market research and canvassing’), but this provides very little detail. They do, however, have to provide invoices for any spend over £200 so there is a vast resource available to find out more.

Setup

• For notebooks and other scripts to run successfully set the variables in config.json accordingly.
• No env requirements file provided yet. Ensure all needed packages are installed and follow their instruction guidelines

Results

All results are provided in notebooks