As a sociologist, I see the world as consisting of two kinds of objects: individual people or groups and the relationships that exist between them. To understand the social world, we need to track both.

To see what I mean, let’s look at Maine leadership PACs, fundraising groups led by members of the Maine State Legislature. On March 8 the editorial board of the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel recommended that leadership PACs be outlawed.

Why? To answer this question, we might use Maine Ethics Commission data to look at the committees’ individual activity last year:

This individual-level table describes who is involved in leadership PACs (both Republicans and Democrats, both women and men, both senators and representatives) and how widely the PACs’ activities are. But these individual characteristics, while important, are not enough.

The editorial board’s concern stems from the sense of obligation that the sending and receiving of money creates. Obligations occur in relationships between individuals.

Let’s track some of those relationships. In the graph below, arrows track contributions from one leadership PAC to another, with larger arrows indicating larger contributions between PACs.

Not surprisingly, the flow of money between leadership PACs is segregated by party in this otherwise strongly connected network.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the pattern of money flow differs between parties. While Democratic leadership PACs funnel contributions to broad party committees, the largest transfers between Republican leadership PACs are directed to the leadership PACs of two Senators, Roger Katz (Capital Leadership PAC) and Andre Cushing (RESPECT MAINE).

These differences in relations may reflect or lead to important differences in political power in a legislature whose decisions affect us all.