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Notes on Methodology:

Corporate Contributions to Sponsors of Anti-Protest Bills (see spreadsheet tab 1.2 for results):

Anti-protest legislation was identified using the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law’s US Protest Law Tracker.

The bills we included were introduced between June 1, 2020 and April 8, 2021, when the most recent bill was introduced in Wisconsin.

The Greenpeace data includes a few bills that are not included in the ICNL tracker, all of which are specifically noted in the spreadsheet. Most of these were concurrent bills, or predecessors to bills included in the ICNL dataset. Including these concurrent or predecessor bills allowed us to identify additional legislative sponsors. In addition to each state legislature’s website for each bill, Legiscan pages for each bill were used to help confirm all relevant sponsors.

Corporate campaign contribution data for sponsors and cosponsors of the bills was retrieved from the National Institute on Money in Politics. Contributions for the full 2019 - 2020 election cycle are included. (Note that there are links in the bill tracking spreadsheet to the Follow the Money site. As of April 1, 2021, no data was available for 2021. But as data is added, those links will automatically incorporate the updated information.)

The initial data set included the combined contributions made by corporations to the sponsors of ALL of the anti-protest legislation on our list. The data set was then narrowed down to exclude companies that made contributions totaling less than $10,000. In addition, to identify those companies that have contributed to the sponsors of multiple bills, companies making 2 or less contributions were eliminated.

Contributions made by corporate subsidiaries are attributed to parent corporations and identified in the final list. (See Tab 1.2, Column B, and full accounting in Tab 1.3).

Amounts include direct corporate contributions and affiliated business PACs. Contributions made directly to candidates by individuals affiliated with specific companies (e.g. executives, board members and employees) are excluded.

Corporate Contributions to Sponsors of both Anti-Protest and Anti-Voting Bills (see spreadsheet tab 2.2 for results):

A list of legislators that sponsored both state anti-protest bills and anti-protest bills was assembled by cross-checking the list of anti-protest bill sponsors (see anti-protest spreadsheet tab 1.1) against a list of 2021 state anti-voter bill sponsors obtained from the Voting Rights Lab’s bill tracker on April 17, 2021.

The resulting list of legislators who sponsored both types of legislation can be found on the anti-protest bill spreadsheet tab 2.1.

As with the data described above, these bills were introduced by state legislators between June 1, 2020, and April 8, 2021.

Corporate campaign srcontribution data for sponsors and cosponsors of the bills was retrieved from the National Institute on Money in Politics. Contributions for the full 2019 - 2020 election cycle are included. (Note that there are links in the bill tracking spreadsheet to the Follow the Money site. As of April 1, 2021, no data was available for 2021. But as data is added, those links will automatically incorporate the updated information. )

The raw data set was then narrowed down to exclude any individual contributors (specific people), partisan PACs, government offices, tribes, unions, business trade associations, single-issue organizations, and any other entities that are not private or public corporations and affiliated business PACs. Contributions made directly to candidates by individuals affiliated with specific companies (e.g. executives, board members and employees) are excluded.

The remaining list of companies was then trimmed to include only companies that contributed over $5,000. All of those remaining companies, as well as companies close to the $5,000 limit, were examined for subsidiaries with contributions that were not included in total contributions for their parent companies. All relevant subsidiary expenditures were then combined to reflect totals, organized by parent company (see full accounting in Tab 2.3).

Contributions made by corporate subsidiaries are attributed to parent corporations and identified in the final list. (See Tab 1.2, column B, and full accounting in Tab 1.4).

Relevant to each data set:

Contributions made by individuals through their employer’s PAC are included. We believe this is reasonable since it is impossible to distinguish corporate and employee contributions made through PACs. Plus, as the Conference Board suggested in a recent report on corporate political activity, “[T]the press, employees, and others conflate corporate giving and PAC giving. To some extent, that’s understandable given the legal authority companies have to create, administer and, if they wish, determine who receives funds from the PAC.”

Other corporate contributions that might have been made indirectly through partisan PACs, business trade associations, “dark money” organizations [e.g. 501(c)4 non-profits] and other entities such as the American Legislative Exchange Council -- reported or not -- are not included. Because we are focused on corporate contributions, other contributors -- including labor unions, tribes, and police and other professional associations -- were excluded.

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