Methodology

Overview

The Sellout Index is a composite score (0–100) that quantifies how entangled a member of Congress is with corporate, special interest, and foreign-connected money. It combines eight independent signals, each converted to a percentile rank across all current members, then combined via a weighted average.

A higher score means more financial entanglement — not necessarily corruption. The index measures observable financial patterns from public disclosures. Every score is backed by verifiable public record data.

Data Scale

Every score is computed from real data across these public sources.

537 of 538members scored · Average score: 49.6· Last updated: 4/11/2026

Scoring Categories

Data Pipeline

Raw data is collected from 10 public sources via automated ETL scripts, transformed into percentile-ranked scores, and merged into a single composite index. No database — the pipeline produces static JSON consumed directly by this site.

Normalization

Raw values in each category are converted to percentile ranks (0-100) across all current members of Congress. This handles the wildly different scales between categories (dollars vs. count vs. percentage) and is robust to skewed distributions where a few members dominate.

When data for a category is unavailable, that category's weight is redistributed proportionally among the remaining categories. A "confidence score" indicates how many of the eight signals were available (0-1).