Introduction:
Every year members of the United States Congress are given a budget to help them run their offices, as well as any other expenses involved. The way and amount that these members spend their budget could be a good indicator on their own political values. Historically, Republicans and Democrats differ in their own unique ways. One of those ways they differ is their respective financial beliefs. Republicans often appear to believe in fiscal conservatism, but does that mean they spend less than Democrats? In this post, I will be focusing on 2020, and the amount of money spent on travel between the two parties, and evaluating which party spent the most money on travel in 2020.
Data
The data used for this analysis is from the ProPublica disbursement data, which are detailed CSV files that include information about; Payee’s, program, member, and purpose of purchase. This data has been collected since 2009, however for ease of access, as well as time, I will be only looking at data from 2020 quarter 1. The disbursement data on the congress members is almost everything that will be needed, however I also brought in member data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. This data includes information about each individual member, and their respective party and will be critical to any comparison made between the two parties. Combining this data with the disbursement data, we can critically look at the amount of money spent, and compare the two parties’ amount in spendings.
Trends
The disbursement data, with the member information allows us to see how each party is spending, specifically on travel. At a low level, in the first quarter of 2020 Republicans spent more money on travel than Democrats. With the bar graph above, we can see that in total, Republicans spent more money on travel, but only by a small margin. From this, we can dive into more specific details on what the money was spent on.
Looking into specifics, the table above shows the sub categories of travel expenses, along with the party affiliation, and amount spent in each of these categories. This table provides some interesting data, as in the major categories it appears that Democrats spent more than Republicans. The three main subcategories of travel that see the most money spent, are logical and make sense. On top, we have commercial transportation, in which Democrats spend about three hundred thousand more dollars than Republicans. This difference in amount spent can be attributed to a majority of congress members from territories outside the mainland of the United States are Democrats. Among the top categories is also private auto mileage, and lodging. Something else I found interesting looking at this was how Republicans almost doubled the amount of money spent on private auto mileage. At nearly twice as much spent as Democrats, this find goes in tandem with Democrats spending more money on commercial transportation. Lodging is also among the top three major expenditures, in which the Democrats spent about 50 thousand more than Republicans. Some limitations that I encountered affected my ability to use a larger set of data. In a perfect world my available resources would allow me to merge all the 2020 data, as well as surrounding years, and comparing and contrasting the percentage change per year. I want to emphasize that larger sets of data provide better and more accurate analysis, which in turn makes focusing on one quarter less precise.
After this quick glance into congress members travel expenditures, it is interesting to see how closely similar the two major political parties are with their travel expenses. In most of the major travel categories the amount of money spent is relatively similar, prompting a conclusion that both parties, in the first quarter 2020 spent roughly the same amount on travel, despite more Democrat congressional members being from outside territories.
