littlesis — LittleSis network of power (2022, 2024, 2026)

Description

The LittleSis database ("the opposite of Big Brother"), a collaborative database of the relationships between powerful people and organizations in the United States (and beyond), maintained by the Public Accountability Initiative. Its entries are edited by researchers, journalists and volunteers from public sources (news, government filings, corporate reports, campaign finance and lobbying disclosures, which are also imported in bulk), and record "who knows who" among business executives, politicians, lobbyists, financiers and their affiliated institutions.

Each node is an entity of the database, a person or an organization, and each directed edge is a relationship between two entities, from entity1 to entity2 of the record, of one of twelve categories: position (a person holds a position in an organization, e.g. as director), education (a person studied at a school), membership (an entity is a member of an organization), family, donation (the first entity gave money or goods to the second, e.g. a campaign contribution), transaction (the two entities did business, e.g. as contractor and client), lobbying (the first entity lobbied the second), social, professional, ownership (the first entity owns a share of the second), hierarchy (between organizations, e.g. a subsidiary) and generic. The relationships are directed as recorded, even those of symmetric categories (e.g. family). The network is a multigraph: two entities can have several relationships, e.g. donations in several election cycles (some entities are also related to themselves).

The bulk files of LittleSis (entities.json.gz and relationships.json.gz) are replaced in place by new versions, and the site refuses them to scripts. The networks are built from copies archived by the Internet Archive: of August 9, 2022 (2022), January 23, 2024 (2024) and October 19, 2026 (2026, the latest; two earlier copies of 2026, of April and May, are left out). A few relationships (11 in 2022, 8 in 2024, 3 in 2026) involve entities that are missing from the entities file (presumably deleted); these are included as nodes without attributes (has_record false).

The networks have the following properties:

(Node) entity_id: the id of the entity in LittleSis (its page is https://littlesis.org/entities/<entity_id>).
(Node) has_record: whether the entity is in the entities file.
(Node) name: the name of the entity.
(Node) kind: Person or Org.
(Node) types: its types (e.g. Business Person, Lobbyist, Public Company, Political Fundraising Committee).
(Node) blurb: a short description.
(Node) summary: a longer one.
(Node) aliases: its other names.
(Node) website: its website.
(Node) start_date, end_date: e.g. the dates of birth and death or of foundation and dissolution (as given, YYYY-MM-DD with 00 for unknown months and days).
(Node) parent_id: the id of the parent organization (-1 if none).
(Node) updated_at: the time of the last update of the record (Unix time).
(Node) extensions: the attributes specific to its types (e.g. the parts of the names, gender and party ids, net worth, revenue, stock ticker, SEC CIK), as a JSON object.
(Node) tags (2024 and 2026): the tags of the entity (thematic research projects, e.g. fracking).
(Edge) relationship_id: the id of the relationship in LittleSis.
(Edge) category and category_id: its category (see above, ids 1 to 12 in that order).
(Edge) description: a sentence describing it (e.g. "Linda S Wolf has a position (Director) at Walmart Inc.").
(Edge) description1 and description2: the roles of the two entities (e.g. Director, Contractor/Client).
(Edge) amount and currency: the amount of money involved (NaN if not given).
(Edge) goods: the goods involved.
(Edge) filings: the number of filings on which a donation or transaction is based (-1 if not given).
(Edge) start_date and end_date: as for the nodes.
(Edge) is_current: whether the relationship is current (1, 0, or -1 if unknown).
(Edge) updated_at: the time of the last update (Unix time).
(Edge) category_attributes: the attributes specific to the category (e.g. is_board and compensation of positions, degree_id of education, percent_stake of ownership), as a JSON object.

Tags

Social Economic Political Affiliation Multigraph Weighted Metadata

Added

2026-10-31

Citation

Public Accountability Initiative, "LittleSis: a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government." Bulk data (2022, 2024, 2026) littlesis.org

Upstream URL OK

https://littlesis.org/database/bulk_data
https://web.archive.org/web/20261019163047/https://littlesis.org/database/public_data/entities.json.gz

Upstream license

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Networks

Tip: click on a column header to sort the list, or hover over it for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	EPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
2022	402,954	1,662,211	4.13	75.82	283.94	808.01	-0.08	36	0.86	Directed	Unipartite	entity_id has_record name blurb summary website start_date end_date kind parent_id updated_at aliases types extensions	relationship_id category_id category description description1 description2 currency goods start_date end_date amount filings is_current updated_at category_attributes	77.6 MiB	95.7 MiB	94.2 MiB	120.0 MiB
2024	413,057	1,733,487	4.20	75.77	286.11	805.42	-0.08	36	0.86	Directed	Unipartite	entity_id has_record name blurb summary website start_date end_date kind parent_id updated_at aliases types tags extensions	relationship_id category_id category description description1 description2 currency goods start_date end_date amount filings is_current updated_at category_attributes	79.9 MiB	99.0 MiB	97.5 MiB	123.9 MiB
2026	443,997	1,885,509	4.25	75.23	290.26	805.17	-0.08	36	0.86	Directed	Unipartite	entity_id has_record name blurb summary website start_date end_date kind parent_id updated_at aliases types tags extensions	relationship_id category_id category description description1 description2 currency goods start_date end_date amount filings is_current updated_at category_attributes	85.3 MiB	105.8 MiB	104.2 MiB	132.2 MiB

Ridiculograms^*

^* These are automatically generated force-directed visualizations, and can be quite meaningless for networks both big and small. They should not be taken seriously as sources of scientific insight. See here for a discussion.