Whether you want to align your portfolio with your politics, use our data to give yourself a competitive stock-buying or sales-targeting advantage, or are just curious about your employer’s or your own company’s politics, this guide will help you navigate our dashboard and PSI scores.
Understanding the Political Scoring Index Scores
In order to use our data effectively, you must first understand what our scores mean. The PSI scores are measured from 0 to 100%. The scores represent each company’s percentile rank as compared to all other companies in our database. In other words, all company PSI scores for each subcategory (Democrat, Republican, PAC, & Management & Executives) are bench-marked against our entire data set of companies for that specific subcategory. That means a company with a 95% score in a subcategory has higher overall donation totals in that subcategory than all other companies we are tracking.
What constitutes a “good” score depends on your perspective and personal beliefs. If you want companies and their senior management and executives to stay out of politics, then you want to invest in companies with low scores. A 0% in the PAC subcategory, for example, means the company does not have its own political action committee or donate to any PACs.
On the flip side, if you want to support companies that donate to Republicans, you want a company with a high Republican score. And if your ultimate goal is to support companies that are primarily Republican or Democrat, you should check out our Republican and Democrat pages, which only show companies that donate 75% or more of their total donation amount to Republicans or Democrats, respectively.
Out Total PSI score blends all of our subcategory scores to give an overall political influence score for every company. This can be used to benchmark a company’s overall participation in politics.
Navigating the Dashboard
Our dashboard is broken down by party, industry and market for your convenience. If you just want to look up companies, we recommend using our Total PSI Scores and Subcategory Scores pages. The Total PSI Scores page allows you to search our entire data set to see the Total PSI score for every company. Our Subcategory Scores page functions identically except it shows the subcategory scores for Democrat, Republican, PAC and Managers & Executives.
We have also grouped companies by industry, so you can compare companies across the following industries (and see the average scores in each industry): Aerospace & Defense, Airlines, Auto & Auto Components, Banks, Diversified Financials, Drugs & Biotech, Electronics, Energy, Food & Staples Retail, Food, Beverage & Tobacco, Health Care, Hotels & Gaming, Household & Personal Products, Insurance, Internet Retail, Materials, Media, Real Estate, Retail, Services, Social Media, Software & Services, Tech Hardware, Telecom, Transportation, and Utilities.
How To Tailor Your Portfolio to Your Politics
This is a three step process.
(1) First, you must determine which PSI scores are acceptable to you. For example, are you OK with companies donating to PACs? If not, you should look for companies with low PAC PSI scores. Are you OK with companies donating to Democrats? If not, you should look for companies with low Democrat scores. If you are looking to support one party over the other, we recommend picking from the companies listed on our Democrat and Republican pages. We have also listed notable Democrat and Republican companies on each industry category page. So, for example, if you’re looking for a Democrat energy company, you can go to our energy page and easily find a few.
(2) Once you know which scores you are looking for, you should make a list of companies that meet your personal criteria. You should also consider companies that do not donate significantly to either party.
(3) Last, you need to financially vet the companies as you would with any of your investments. Our website is NOT intended to provide you with investment advice; we are only looking to make your investment decisions more-informed.
Check back at least monthly because our PSI scores will change as we update our data. In addition, our research team is working hard to add companies, so if you don’t see a particular company that you are looking for, please check back regularly.