If you've searched for a way to check a company's political spending before you buy from them, you've probably found Goods Unite Us, or BuyPartisan before it — barcode-scan tools that have let shoppers check brands this way since 2014 [3]. We get asked how NOligarchy is different often enough that it's worth answering directly, without pretending the other tool doesn't exist.

Short version: we answer a different question, on purpose.

Goods Unite Us assigns every company a Goods Score, on a scale of -100 to +100, pulled from FEC records of company and executive political donations [1][2]. The score is explicitly a party-lean measure: more money donated overall pulls the score down, and a higher share of that money going to Democratic candidates and PACs pulls it up [2]. In plain terms, the question it's answering is "does this company's money lean red or blue?"

That's a legitimate, useful question — if you want to shop in line with a specific party's candidates, a Goods Score tells you exactly that, sourced from the same public FEC filings we use.

NOligarchy doesn't compute which party a company's money favors, and a company's score doesn't move based on party. We score oligarchic behavior — the concentration of wealth, power, and influence into very few hands — through three weighted pillars, combined into a single 0–100 result [4]:

One mechanic worth naming: our Political Access pillar flags companies that give substantially to both parties in the same election cycle. We didn't invent this idea. Political scientists have a name for it — access-oriented giving [5] — and describe interest groups hedging their bets across both major parties "in the hopes of having access regardless of who wins" [6]. Our contribution is only to measure it consistently and publish the thresholds [4]. It is the opposite of a party-lean measure: hedged giving isn't neutral in our methodology, it's the clearest signal that spending is buying access rather than backing a cause.

A small number of people accumulating outsized wealth, power, and influence is not a red problem or a blue problem. It is a systemic one, and it is happening on both sides of the aisle at once. A party-lean score, by design, sorts companies onto one side of a fight — but that fight isn't the one that determines whether ordinary people have a say.

We think the red-versus-blue frame actively obscures this. While attention goes to which team a company's money backs, the far more consequential facts go unexamined: how much money is in the system at all, how concentrated it is, and how reliably it buys outcomes regardless of who wins. Leaving party out of our score isn't a hedge or a marketing position — it is the whole point. Sorting by team would reproduce exactly the distraction we think is the problem.

It also makes the score checkable regardless of your own politics: a lobbying filing, a CEO pay ratio, and a regulatory fine total are facts, not lean. That's deliberate. We want a Republican and a Democrat looking at the same company's page to agree on what the numbers say — because concentrated corporate power costs them both, and that is something people who agree on very little else can still agree on.

These tools aren't competing for the same answer. If you want to know whether a company's donations lean toward your preferred party, Goods Unite Us answers that directly, it does it well, and we don't try to. Plenty of people want both readings, and there's no reason to pick exactly one.

What we'd add is that our question is one you can act on without first settling which party you back. Keeping wealth, power, and influence from concentrating into a handful of hands isn't a partisan aim — it's close to a precondition for everyone else's aims, whatever those are. That's the version of "vote with your dollar" we're building: one that doesn't require you to join a side first.

Goods Unite Us and BuyPartisan answer "which side does this company's money support." We answer a different one: how much political influence is this company buying, how much wealth is it moving to the top rather than to the people who produced it, and how often does it break the rules and absorb the fine as a cost of doing business? Those three together are what concentration of power actually looks like in disclosed filings — and every input traces to the same kind of public federal record either tool would point you to.

The reason we score it at all is that this concentration is otherwise invisible at the moment it matters, which is the moment you're deciding where to spend. A single purchase doesn't move a company. Millions of them, made with the information in hand, are the one form of leverage most people actually hold. Check the retailer you're about to buy from, and decide which question matters to you.