Election vs Non-election Year Spending
“All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.”
Mark Twain
The above quote is something that most people will be able to laugh at and relate to in some way. I find this quote particularly amusing because it came from an author who died in 1910 but the quote still perfectly describes how many people feel about government. It is interesting that the one thing that seems to unite this country across political lines is the distrust and resentment of many political figures. Perhaps this is not a uniquely American phenomena as most countries have their political quarrels, but for those of us living in America it does seem that we have a unique zest and vigor for politics and the support of and hatred for certain parties and people.
Now the question that I have often asked myself is, “Is this animosity toward politicians justified?” I am not talking about someone who you disagree with on the political level (i.e. you are a Republican and they are a Democrat) but more the general distrust of politicians. Are all politicians distrustful and out to deceive people into voting for them for the sole purpose of gaining and maintaining power.
This is the question that I had in mind when I began examining data from the US House of Representative’s spending habits. Now this is a huge dataset with millions if not billions of different data points so it goes without saying that there are many different stories that one could tell from this data and I am certainly not going to be able to encapsulate everything about the data in the post but I do think that I can answer at least a little bit of the question that I posed at the beginning of the paper as to if the general distrust of politicians is justified.
The way that I went about answering this question was first by thinking about the fact that the way that politicians spend money should be an indication of their trustworthiness or at least the thing that they really care about. For instance if a politician spends a lot of money on a frivolous lifestyle they most likely fit into the category of untrustworthy. Now this paper will be looking at Congress as a whole, not individual members as that would take far more time space than I have here. During election years these politicians face more scrutiny than in non-election years simply because the electors are deciding whether or not to keep them around. The hypothesis that I have come up with is that if politicians dramatically change their spending habits during election years then it is more than likely that they are more concerned with staying in power than they are in actually helping the country.
The years that I picked to analyze were 2013 and 2016 and below I have several visualizations to help the reader understand the findings of the data analysis. I chose to analyze the two most common spending categories of Congress (Travel, and Rent, Communication and Utilities).
2013 Travel Spending:
2016 Travel Spending:
2013 Rent, Communication, and Utilities:
2016 Rent, Communication, and Utilities:
So, the answer to our question at the beginning of the paper of do the spending habits of Congress change from an election year to a non-election year and the answer is yes but not to the degree to raise considerable suspicion as to the motives of congress in general. As one can see upon inspecting the graphs the spending stayed it the same rough areas for both years. In short what we have discovered is that there is variation in the spending habits of Congress, and obviously this is to be expected but there does not seem to be any correlation to election vs. non-election years.
Some things that I would like to point out about this paper. The data that I used here is fairly limited. This is partially by design and partially by happenstance. I knew that if I tried to include all the data that I possibly could I would not be able to pull anything distinguishable from the data. I also am not completely able to manipulate the large datasets to the level that I would like to be able to. In short I know that there is a lot more that I could get from this data. I was just having a hard time choosing what data to include and how I could use it to tell the story.