1.2. X-ray of 16 candidates according to their behavior relative to 10 key laws

Publicado el 03.04.14 por Momi Peralta Ramos

Journalist Lucrecia Bullrich (Political section, paper edition) together with LNData team did research to evaluate how government and opposition legislators that were running for reelection in the 2013 Legislative Elections voted; and how was the debate on those bills between 2009 and the present.

The team selected 10 important laws voted between 2009 and 2013, and analyzed the vote of 26 national deputies (Voters under 18 ask for more training) that competed for reelection in the lower chamber or for a seat in the Senate.

Watch the following step by step video for the collection of data required for this project:

The story included a tableau visualization with a view of how the candidates voted on the 10 bills, filtered by bill and name of legislator. It is also possible to see the detail of the affirmative, negative and abstention votes on a particular bill.

>> Link to the story
X-ray of 26 candidates according to their behavior relative to 10 key laws

1.1. Opposition candidates that seek to renew their mandate, with those most absent from sessions at the top

Publicado el 03.04.14 por Momi Peralta Ramos

Journalist Laura Serra (Political section, paper edition) and the LNData team worked together to study the attendance records of 74 national deputies (members of the lower chamber of Congress) that aspired to extend their mandate in the Parliamentary Elections of 2013.

The conclusion the team arrived at after studying the data is that, of the universe of 74 candidates, the opposition legislators were the ones presenting the highest indices of absenteeism in the last three and a half years.

Original document capture (example)

See document online

The story also includes a Tableau presentation that allows user to visualize a ranking of the 74 candidates with the best and worst attendance record for the 57 sessions studied.

The visualization also allowed filtering by name of deputy, year or party block (party), allowing users to do their own detailed searches and investigations.

>> Link to story
Opposition candidates that want to renew their mandates with the most absentee at the top

Making public the salaries of the President and ministers in less than 24 hours

Publicado el 03.04.14 por Momi Peralta Ramos

Press release announcing the publication of the salaries of the President and ministers

From the beginning we were interested in taking the greatest advantage of Declaraciones Juradas Abiertas (Open Asset Declarations), the site we created to inform in an understandable and accessible way the statements of wealth of the main officials of the three branches of government. That is why we thought of working with their salaries.

The investigation started when we wanted to analyze the evolution of the salary of the president and her ministers for the period 2012-2014. The first thing we did was to search for this information in the patrimonial statements, containing a specific field where they have to give this information in detail. We found here a first problem: some specified their monthly wages instead of the annual amount. To solve this first problem, we decided to ask for the information from the office of the General Secretary of the Presidency, making use of the current regulation on access to public information (decree 1172/03).

This agency in the year 2012 in its website published a form specifying the gross and net salary of these officials. In the process we learned that NGO had asked for the same information a year before and that it had been denied, with the argument that the salaries were personal data. After brief meetings with members of the staff of the newspaper we agreed to ask for the same but in a different manner. Thus, we asked for the last version of the document in which the Presidency informed the remunerations of the highest posts in the executive branch.

The answer again was negative. “We are informing you that salaries are considered sensitive information, according to the law 25.326 (law of personal data). Thus we turned this negative reply into a story. On February 20 we told what had happened (The presidency denied the information on Cristina Kirchner and her minister’s salaries).

Less than 10 hours after this was published, the Presidency published a press release in which it expressed that there had been an error “in not providing the information required relative to the current salary of Madam President, dr. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her ministers, and that by her express indication they have been published, with the corresponding apology”.

Ate the same time, the state agency published on its website the document in PDF format with the current information.

To make the data more understandable and add value for the reader, the text was transformed into text (with an OCR tool) and information was put online on a spreadsheet. The following day a table was added with a search tool and the possibility of downloading the data inf CSV, XLS and PDF format (“Cristina published her salary: She earns 48366 pesos per month”).

In journalistic terms, transforming a negative to present information into a story, we got the National Government to publish data of great interest for all citizens.

All the stories on the case

Some repercussions of the story

The next day the news was on the front page of the main print media.

The cabinet chief in a press conference justified Cristina’s and the minister’s salaries.

President’s private secretary resigns after his wealth come to light

Publicado el 02.04.14 por Momi Peralta Ramos

Thanks to a new regulation on statements of wealth approved in 2013, all material on the wealth of officials is published online in the Anticorruption Office site. From there at the beginning of 2014 we took the asset statements of the private secretaries of the President: Martín Federico Aguirres and Pablo Erasmo Barreiro. Both, according to the documents they presented, were able to increase their patrimony substantially in 2012. After an analysis by journalist Iván Ruiz, the first tripled his wealth, while Barreiros increased his in 70%.

Together with the use of official information, there was a search in different press archives to further investigate the patrimony of these private secretaries.

IMPACT

Almost 4 months after the publication of the story, Aguirres resigns his position, due to the accusations of illicit enrichment against him. Seguir leyendo →

Salaries of officials of the City of Buenos Aires: a minister complaint, a payslip and the wrong data from the Government

Publicado el 02.04.14 por Momi Peralta Ramos

The Government of the City of Buenos Aires has a catalog of data where it publishes information in open format to make different areas of its administration more open to the public eye.

We began searching among the datasets available to work with those of high relevance considering public interest.

We decided to download the datasets related to the salaries of the cabinet officials and the chief of the Buenos Aires administration.

Working with the database

As a first task, we downloaded the two files with the salaries for 2012 and 2013, we merged them in one Excel spreadsheet so we could calculate the monthly variations. The data was distributed in several columns to facilitate the analysis and to have the chance to get a global vision of the whole set.

Because the published databases were clean, with no important mistakes, there was no need to do a lot of work on the information published by the City administration.

For a first story (More than 40 percent pay rise for BA ministers) we decided to calculate the percentage variations between July 2012 and July 2013, since the information published reached that month.

In the second story (Another pay rise for BA ministers: 20% in the last semester) with the complete 2013 data, the percentage difference was calculated for the period July-December 2013.

To facilitate the journalistic work, in both cases rankings by official were created according to salaries for all of 2012 and changes in ranking were analyzed according to salaries perceived in 2013.

The visualizations

When the work on the database was done, the journalists and the multimedia design team met to create a visualization that would clearly show the conclusions they had arrived at.

For the first publication, the percentage salary rise between July 2012 and July 2013 was considered.

The second visualization worked with the information of the second semester of 2013. Seguir leyendo →