Inheritors of the constitutional framework

Aligned organizations

The intellectual framework on /first-principles/ names the historical thinkers — Smith, Madison, Bastiat, Hayek, Buchanan, Tullock, Olson, Stigler — who diagnosed the corporate-capture pattern. This page names the contemporary organizations applying that diagnosis at the operational level: government-records databases, constitutional litigation, lobbying-network analysis, public-choice scholarship, and state-level transparency. Their methodology informs ours.

This is not an endorsement of every position any of these organizations take. It is a recognition of operational kinship: each of them, in their area, treats public records, constitutional originalism, or empirical public-choice analysis as the foundation for accountability. We adopt their methods — the entity-relationship tracking model from InfluenceWatch, the bipartite community-detection approach from LobbyView, the antitrust-style concentration analysis informed by DOJ guidelines, the litigation-actionability framing from Goldwater Institute, Institute for Justice, and Pacific Legal Foundation.

Tier 1 — direct methodological influence

Databases and analytic platforms whose entity models we adopt

These are the operational sources — entity schemas, network-analysis methods, statistical-fraud detection tooling — that the NPE analytics layer adapts to Nevada-specific data.

InfluenceWatch (Capital Research Center) — entity-by-entity database of political organizations with explicit board/officer relationship edges. Each org documented with formation date, leadership, financials, advocacy activities, funding sources, and cross-entity links. Their schema is the model for our /anomalies/ shared-officer detector.
OpenSecrets (formerly Center for Responsive Politics + FollowTheMoney merger) — federal + state campaign-finance, ballot-measure, lobbying, and independent-spending data. Public API. Hierarchical entity structure with drill-down. We already maintain Nevada-specific equivalents; their categorization scheme (industries, top-donors-by-cycle) is reference.
LobbyView (academic platform, MIT) — bipartite link-community model (biLCM) for inferring legislative communities of interest groups. Our Louvain community detection on the lobbyist-client graph adapts this method directly. Citation: Imai et al., "Mapping Political Communities."
Project on Government Oversight (POGO) — federal contract oversight, FOIA litigation, revolving-door appointee databases. Their revolving-door methodology informs /revolving-door/.
Open the Books — federal + state government spending transparency at line-item level. Aggregates 50M+ payment records.
Government Accountability Institute (Schweizer) — deep-dive investigations using public records + financial-disclosure cross-referencing. Investigation pattern: identify a target, FOIA + financial disclosures + LLC tracing, surface coordinated patterns. Same pattern our shadow-org detector implements algorithmically.

Tier 2 — constitutional originalism + state liberty

Pro-Constitution organizations doing the legal and scholarly work

Inheritors of Madison, Tocqueville, Hayek, Buchanan/Tullock, Olson — present-day institutions whose litigation, scholarship, or model-legislation work operationalises the framework on /first-principles/.

Goldwater Institute — state-level constitutional litigation, transparency lawsuits, model legislation library. Their "Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation" advocates before state supreme courts. Direct ally for state-level Nevada constitutional cases. Their pro-bono attorney network is a referral pipeline for findings that rise to litigation.
Institute for Justice — constitutional litigation against occupational licensing, civil forfeiture, eminent-domain abuse. Their "Strategic Research" arm pairs litigation with empirical reports — model for "find anomaly → publish report → file litigation."
Pacific Legal Foundation — property-rights, free-speech, regulatory-reform constitutional litigation.
Mountain States Legal Foundation — Western-states constitutional / property-rights / federal-overreach litigation. Nevada-specific resource.
Tenth Amendment Center — state sovereignty, anti-federal-overreach, nullification scholarship. Aligns with our Madison Federalist 10/51 framing on /first-principles/.
Convention of States Action — Article V convention movement; state-level constitutional restoration.
Cato Institute — libertarian/public-choice scholarship in the Hayek/Buchanan/Tullock/Olson tradition. Already cited on /first-principles/ via those thinkers. Their "Project on Federal Spending Restraint" and "Center for Constitutional Studies" produce relevant empirical work.
Mercatus Center (George Mason University) — academic public-choice and regulatory-state scholarship. Their "RegData" project quantifies regulatory-text growth — methodology adaptable for NV-specific regulatory-capture metrics.
Federalist Society — originalist / textualist legal community. Network of Nevada state-court judges and attorneys.
Heritage Foundation — constitutional originalism. Their "Index of Economic Freedom" methodology for ranking state regulatory burden is reference.

Tier 3 — state-level free-market + accountability think tanks

State Policy Network peers

Member organizations of the State Policy Network — state-level free-market think tanks doing similar work in their states. Direct methodological exchange potential.

Nevada Policy Research Institute (NPRI) — already in our NELIS data (opposed AB238 Summerlin Studios tax-credit testimony). Existing in-state ally.
Mackinac Center (Michigan) — strong on union transparency, pension liability.
John Locke Foundation (North Carolina) — annual "By the Numbers" state-spending report.
Texas Public Policy Foundation — strongest state-SPN organization by budget.
Empire Center (New York) — operates SeeThroughNY, the gold standard for state-spending visualization.
Show-Me Institute (Missouri) — state spending and transparency.

Tier 4 — investigative journalism with political-data focus

Newsrooms whose data-journalism methodology is reference

Investigative outlets whose published methodologies inform our verification and publication policy.

ProPublica — Nerd Blog publishes data-journalism methodology. "Documenting Hate," "Machine Bias," and "Nonprofit Explorer" projects are the gold standard for systematic data-driven investigation.
Center for Public Integrity — federal-level investigative reporting; cross-references campaign finance + lobbying + procurement.
MapLight — connects bill votes to donor relationships. Methodology directly applicable to our (forthcoming) NV vote-data layer.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) — FOIA-focused, federal-level.
Capital Research Center — parent of InfluenceWatch (Tier 1). Also publishes Foundation Watch / Labor Watch / Green Watch issue trackers.
Judicial Watch — FOIA + commercial databases + human sources + litigation discovery. Operational pattern: identify issue → file FOIA → analyze docs → litigate or expose. Inspiration for our forthcoming Phase 9 FOIA-pipeline.

What this catalogue is and is not

This page is not an endorsement of every position taken by every organization listed. The organizations span a wide ideological range within the broad classical-liberal / public-choice / originalist tradition, and they sometimes disagree with each other on policy specifics. What they share — and what makes them aligned with this site — is their treatment of public records as the foundation for accountability, their commitment to constitutional originalism or to its operational consequences (transparency, due process, separation of powers), and their methodological rigour.

This is a catalogue of operational allies, not a coalition. NPE remains an independent project; we adopt methods we find rigorous and we cite sources transparently. Where we adapt a method from any of these organizations, we say so in the relevant detector's documentation.

Mapping to /first-principles/

Each contemporary organization above inherits from one or more of the historical thinkers documented on /first-principles/:

Madison's Federalist 10/51 on the diffusion of factional power → Tenth Amendment Center, Convention of States Action, Federalist Society.
Hayek's knowledge problem (1945) on the impossibility of central planning → Cato Institute, Mercatus Center.
Buchanan & Tullock's Calculus of Consent (1962) on public-choice modelling of political behaviour → Cato, Mercatus, NPRI, the State Policy Network broadly.
Olson's Logic of Collective Action (1965) on concentrated benefits and dispersed costs → InfluenceWatch / Capital Research Center (entity-relationship tracking exposes the concentrated-benefit recipient), MapLight (vote-donor correlation surfaces it at the legislator level).
Stigler's Theory of Economic Regulation (1971) on regulatory capture → Goldwater, Institute for Justice, Pacific Legal Foundation, Mountain States Legal Foundation (constitutional litigation against captured regulators).
Bastiat's seen and unseen (1850) on the unseen costs of policy → Open the Books, Show-Me Institute, Empire Center (state-spending transparency makes the unseen seen).
Smith on merchants in conspiracy (1776) → ProPublica, Center for Public Integrity, Government Accountability Institute (investigative journalism uncovering merchant-state coordination).

The historical thinkers diagnosed the patterns; the contemporary organizations operationalise the diagnoses. NPE adopts methodology from both sides of that line and applies it to Nevada-specific data.