Worcester Campaign Finance Project

Welcome to the home page of the Worcester Campaign Finance Project.  The aim of this project is to provide citizens of Worcester with information on the amount of money spent in municipal elections and on where this money comes from.  This project draws upon data available from the state of Massachusetts and the city of Worcester; our goal is to organize this information in a way that provides useful information to citizens and promotes consideration of the link between campaign finance and democracy.  We provide this information not to promote or criticize candidates, but in pursuit of openness and transparency in local politics.

The project is the work of students of the Clark University Department of Political Science, under the supervision of Professor Robert Boatright.  For more information, contact Professor Boatright at rboatright@clarku.edu, or at (508) 793-7632.

Tables on Worcester elections, 2005-2019:

Our complete analyses of Worcester elections

For the 2013 and 2015 Worcester elections, we did something different.  Rather than write analyses specific to these election cycles, we pursued a number of more focused studies on particular aspects of campaign financing, looking at trends in Worcester over the 2005-2013 and 2005-2015 periods and comparing Worcester to other cities outside of Massachusetts.  Here are some examples: