House Disbursement Data: A brief oversight into American transparency.
It is often noted that the freedoms that Americans have is far more favorable than that of most countries. While some countries may have authoritarian governments, harsh laws, and political unrest, the United States stands far above these limitations while providing its citizens a guarantee for a life of satisfaction and content. Though the U.S has far more than its fair share of shortcomings with its stained history of the treatment of African-Americans, Native-Americans, and immigrants, there are ideas and ideals that allow the U.S acknowledge these acts of injustice and create a path towards a bright and better future.
Of these ideas and ideals, there is none more persistent and prevalent than that of the Electoral College. The Electoral College was penned by our founding fathers as a way, to simply put, elect our new president and vice president. While most congressional campaigns can be decided by a majority vote, meaning the participant with the most votes wins, the electoral enacts a much more muddled and archaic way of deciding these two victors. Barring the perspective in which the electoral college was created, though this perspective should be studied and understood, the electoral college is concerned with choosing and appointing the correct candidate for the job. It begins with assigning each state a certain number of “electors”, with a full list being found here, and then having the population vote for their candidate which is considered the popular vote. Ultimately, the candidate that obtains over or equal to 270 out of the 538 electoral votes ultimately wins the candidacy. All this to say that the United States has a long tradition of ensuring that politics and the general population do not become separate entities, but are rather a part of the same entity; there is no politics without the common people.
This ideal extends into other areas of government, such as the United States House of Representatives. The House of Representatives is what makes up the lower chamber of Congress, while the Senate makes the upper chamber. Together they make up the legislature of the United States and it is this area of the U.S government that is concerned with passing legislation, also colloquially known as bills; interestingly enough, if neither candidate gets enough electoral votes, then the House decides who becomes president! Despite this, the bridge between the public and politicians still holds in the sense that the people elect the members that sit in the House.
Of course, these members must go through similar tribulations when it comes to campaigning like that of the president, where every vote counts. As such, there exists a database where you can access US House disbursement data. This idea here is what comprises the rest of this article, to compare the spending between states as well as the spending between Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. As a starting point for my analysis, I first downloaded the related csv’s (house context, election, and members) to pick out the relevant details. I noticed that both the 2021 3rd quarter disbursement data and house context data both provided me with an id column to identify the members and their political party; I merged these two tables on this shared column, which can be seen here:
My next step was then to see how spending differed from state to state, this visualization can be shown here:
It’s clear to see that the House members spend the most money, which also makes sense since California has the most ‘electors’ in the country. In fact, this trend continues down the chart; these are the top 10 states that spend the most money, but they are also the top 10 states with the most ‘electors’.
Moving on, I wanted to see how spending varied across the parties. This was accomplished via that last merged that happened and then performing a group-by and aggregation function to obtain the results shown here:
As you can see here, Democrats spend quite a bit more than Republicans in the House and both spend a considerable amount more than Independents.
Though this was a basic understanding of spending in a certain time period, there are various other types of analysis that can be made here, as there are plenty of data to be found. Another avenue that could be considered is the breaking down of these numbers, meaning what purpose the money is being used for. Another potential avenue could be to see how these numbers change over time, and perhaps use statistical analysis to see whether or not any given year strays from the norm and theorize the reasons behind this.
