How does spending compare by party for Colorado’s representatives in the House?
Colorado is one of a few states known in the world of politics as a “purple state”, which is a state where there is a fairly even split between Democrats and Republicans, or where one party holds a very small (<9%) majority over the other. In terms of house seats, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota were all split down the middle by the two major parties during the 117th Congress; while Democrats held a very slight advantage in Colorado and Arizona, and Republicans held a very slight advantage in Georgia and Florida. I will be exclusively focusing on Colorado today, and examining the spending differences between their 7 representatives in the house (4 D, 3 R) during 2021.
I closely examined and analyzed a dataset of the financial disbursement to members of the House of Representatives in Quarter 3 of 2021. This data shows every expense, including the amount and what the money was used for, for every representative during that time.
First, I decided to take a look at total spending by party to get a very broad idea of how they compare. The data shows republican representatives spending $982,441 in Q3 2021, while democratic Representatives spent $1,356,958 in Q3 2021. Democrat spending was approximately 38% higher, and they spent around $339,239 per representative, while republicans spent around $327,480 per representative. This averages out to Democrats spending a marginal 3.5% more per representative. Going off this, I decided to further break down the spending by looking at it broken down by representative and compared them all in a bar graph
I found it interesting that even though the spending per representative by Democrats was only marginally higher than republicans, they still held the top 3 spots for representative spending in Colorado. To see if I could gain additional insight on the spending, I decided to look at all of the expenses sorted by category for both democrats and republicans. All expenses in this data set were sorted into 1 of 8 categories, which are as follows: Personnel compensation, rent & communication utilities, travel, franked mail, supplies & materials, printing & reproduction, equipment, and other services. Both parties spent a large majority of their funds under the category of personnel compensation, but democrats spent roughly 43% more than republicans. This is not necessarily surprising when you once again consider the additional democratic representative, but some of the discrepancies in other categories are interesting. Democrats spent over twice as much on rent & communication utilities as Republicans, which is a significant discrepancy that is not easily explained by the fact that there is one more dem representative. Another interesting discrepancy is the fact that republicans spent almost twice as much as the democrats on travel. This could potentially be explained by the fact that the districts held by democrats are all in urban/suburban areas in the front range, and as a result are significantly smaller in terms of area compared to the districts held by republicans. However, this is merely a hypothesis and it is difficult to make conclusive statements to explain the spending patterns shown in the data.
Curious about these discrepancies between parties, I decided to conduct an independent T-test to compare the transaction-level differences in expenses between each party, and see if the difference was significant. My null hypothesis, H0, is that there is no significant difference in transaction-level spending between the two parties. My alternative hypothesis, HA, is that there IS a significant difference between the spending of the two parties at the transactional level. I established a significance level of 0.05, and then conducted the test. The T-test returned a p-value of 0.004693142228885876, which is lower than my significance threshold of 0.05, and as a result I must reject the null hypothesis H0. To follow this up, I conducted another hypothesis test to determine whether or not there was a significant difference in per capita spending at the party level. My null hypothesis, H0, was that there is no significant difference between the per capita spending at the party level. Conversely, my alternate hypothesis, H0, is that there IS a significant difference in per-capita spending at the party level. My significance level was once again set to 0.05 and I conducted the test. This test returned a p-value of 0.30234905835124365, which means I was unable to reject the null hypothesis. These tests tell me that there is a significant difference in spending at the transactional level between the two parties, but the data was inconclusive about a significant difference in spending at the per-capita level by party.
In conclusion, although democratic representatives spent slightly more per capita than republican representatives overall, an independent T-test failed to find statistically significant differences between the two. Despite some serious discrepancies between how the money is spent between parties, the difference between parties remains fairly minimal. Although these results were slightly mundane, it is ultimately still beneficial to examine how our elected officials at the federal level spend the tax dollars of hard working Americans and we have a duty to hold them accountable when our money is not spent reasonably.
