Congressional disbursements by party and incumbency
Introduction
Members of the United States Congress are given budgets to run their offices, pay for staff, and travel. How Members of Congress spend their budgets could say a lot about how they translate their professed political values into action. Do Republicans who ostensibly believe in fiscal conservativism spend less than Democrats? Do Democrats invest more in their staffers than Republicans’ personnel compensation? Incumbency may also have a strong effect on how politicians spend their budgets. Perhaps established incumbents spend more on their staff given their experience and efforts to retain them. New legislators may employ different strategies for constituent services and communication than incumbents. This post explores the interaction between incumbency and political party among U.S. House members’ disbursements since 2015 to identify significant differences in spending across categories.
Data
Since 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives has published these disbursement data and ProPublica has standardized them into CSV files. I am going to use the disbursement data from the 114th Congress starting in 2015 in conjunction with historical member data (documentation) available from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The member data includes information about whether the legislator is an incumbent as well as the party with whom they caucus (e.g., independents can caucus with Republicans or Democrats). Combining the quarterly disbursement data together with the historical member information into annual-level member expenditures, we compare these expenditures based on caucus affiliation and incumbency.
General trends
The disbursement patterns are relatively stable over time (see chart above) with a handful of significant changes, but flat overall trends. The top expenditure by far is for “Personnel compensation” (pay to staff and consultants) followed by “Rent, Communication, and Utilities”. These trends (especially with the log-scaled axes) might obscure differences over time. Spending on travel (in grey) plummeted in Q2 (April through June) of 2020 and has recovered slightly but remained below pre-pandemic levels.
However, there’s no consistent variation or trend in spending by category by either year (see chart below). Notably, spending on travel decreased significantly for legislators in 2020 and 2021 compared to previous years, almost certainly a consequence of pandemic disruptions. And spending on “franked mail” (mass mailings) and “printing and reproduction” is significantly higher in even years than odd years, an undeniable fingerprint of ethically borderline behavior of using government resources for campaigning purposes.
Spending by party and incumbency
The differences in disbursements by parties gives us some insight into whether politicians’ political beliefs match their behavior. On one hand, fiscally conservative Republicans should spend less overall than Democrats and their commitments to fair wages, for example. Incumbency may also play a role with established legislators spending more because of their staff’s experience.
The chart below shows the interaction of these two dynamics. The red and blue bars correspond to Republican and Democratic legislators (respectively) and the two bars on the left are for non-incumbents’ annual spending versus the incumbents’ spending on the right. Using an independent t-test, there is a significant difference (t=5.39, p<0.001) in spending by political party but not by incumbency: Democratic legislators spend more than Republican legislators. However, there is no significant difference in spending by incumbents versus non-incumbents (t=0.07, p>0.05). But these spending differences break down in interesting ways across parties, as we explore below.
Categories where Democrats spend more than Republicans
Democrats spend significantly more than Republicans in the categories of “Personnel compensation” (t=8.67, p<0.001), “Supplies and materials” (t=3.47, p<0.001), and “Rent, Communication, and Utilities” (t=17.41, p<0.001). These differences could be the consequences of Democratic legislators compensating their staff more and employing more staff and operating more offices and offering more services than their Republican colleagues. Because compensation is the largest category of spending, Democrats spending more on personnel is a primary driver in the overall difference in spending over Republicans.
Interestingly, there is only a significant difference between incumbents and non-incumbents for “Rent, Communication, and Utilities” (t=4.13, p<0.001), largely driven by differences between Democratic incumbents and newcomers. Democratic incumbents spend much more on these services than their new colleagues. There is a very marginal significant difference (t=1.64, p=0.10) difference in incumbency for personnel. This could be a function of new legislators having to lease out offices at higher prices than their colleagues. Breaking this result out by types of staff (chiefs of staff, counsel, speechwriters, etc.) might reveal more meaningful differences for incumbency.
Categories where Republicans spend more than Democrats
Although Republicans spend less than Democrats overall, they do spend significantly more than Democrats in several categories like travel (t=12.65, p<0.001), franked mail (t=11.88, p<0.001), and printing and reproduction (t=3.70, p<0.001). Travel and franked mail warrant greater scrutiny since both spending categories have been abused in the past for campaign-related or personal expenses.
There is a fascinating discrepancy in the spending by incumbents and newcomers for franked mail and printing and reproduction. Non-incumbents (newcomers) spend significantly more than their incumbent colleagues on both categories (franked: t=11.89, p<0.001; printing: t=15.38; p<0.001). Looking closer at this, newcomers have major disbursements (over $100,000 per quarter) to political consulting firms categorized under “Printing and Reproduction”, a practice that has attracted scrutiny. Why these expenditures are significantly higher for non-incumbents than incumbents is interesting and may suggest that newcomers rely on outside consultants rather than internal staff or surviving a punishing primary and general election season compared to their incumbent colleagues.
Conclusions
There are significant differences in how Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House spend their office budgets. While expenditures are generally flat, there is some variation based on the election year and the disruptions caused by the pandemic. Democrats spend more on staff and rent while Republicans spend more on mass mailings, printing, and travel. All of these categories have opportunities for unethical or illegal expenditures, but I am more skeptical of the differences in spending on mass mailings, printing, and travel and would want to explore the drivers of these differences more.
