Is expendtirute gendered? Is it politicized?

INTRODUCTION

The United States House of Representatives plays a crucial role in the nation’s legislative process and each member is given a budget in order to carry out their respective duties. This post means to explore the House’s expenditure patterns in recent years. Understanding the trends in the House’s expenditure can provide insight into how different groups view and utilize taxpayer funds. Furthermore, examining how expenditure varies by gender and political party can illuminate disparities in how extensively these funds are being utilized. This prompts the question: what is the trend in the House of Representatives expenditure over the last six years, and how does it vary by gender and political party affiliation? Additionally, this post seeks to determine whether either of these factors — gender or political party — has a significant impact on total expenditure throughout recent years. By investigating these questions, we can gain a better understanding of the House of Representatives' expenditure patterns and the factors that influence them.

DATA

The House of Representatives has made its expenditure data available since 2009, which ProPublica has converted into CSV files. I am utilizing data from Q3 of 2017 onwards due to slight inconsistencies in the data format prior to that period. Additionally, I am extracting each member’s party affiliation and gender from data on past house members.

OVERALL TRENDS

Given that our data only includes the second half of 2017, it is unsurprising to observe that the average expenditure per representative in 2017 is approximately half of that for the subsequent years in the data. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that house member spending has remained in a relatively consistent range over the past six years, with a maximum variance of approximately 300 thousand dollars. This general trend is also present within the subgroups categorized by political party and gender. Let us further examine these subgroups by determining whether there is a significant difference within their respective bipartite categories.

EXPENDITURE BY GENDER AND PARTY

The distribution of expenditure among political parties has the potential to reveal whether representatives are spending in accordance with their policies, and looking at spending by gender might be similarly illuminating. But is this even relevant? Before delving into the “why” behind each of these distributions, it’s important to examine whether the political party or gender of the representatives has any real impact on their expenditure in the House. To explore this, we will utilize an independent t-test to assess whether there are any significant differences in spending between male and female representatives, as well as between Democratic and Republican members. Our analysis reveals that there is no significant difference in spending between male and female representatives, indicating that not all women have a tendency to overspend! However, when examining the data by political party, we see a less even distribution of expenditure. This may be due to the historical tendency for Republicans to be more fiscally conservative than Democrats, which is in line with the data we have observed.

The analysis above suggests that gender alone did not make a significant difference in spending between male and female representatives. However, we considered the impact on the spending habits of representatives by political affiliation in conjunction with gender. To investigate this, we used another independent t-test, which allowed us to compare the spending of male and female representatives within each political party.

The results of the test showed that, within both the Republican and Democratic parties, there was a significant difference in spending between male and female representatives. The researchers found that, on average, men spent more than women in both parties. The results for the Republican party(t-score = -4.90, p-value = 1.88e-06) and for the Democratic party (t-score = -2.55, p-value = 0.01) indicate that these differences in spending were unlikely to be due to chance and were statistically significant.

CONCLUSION

These findings may have important implications for understanding the role of gender and political affiliation in shaping spending habits within the United States government. It suggests that, even within the same political party, there may be significant differences in spending behavior between male and female representatives. Further research may be needed to explore the underlying factors that contribute to these differences and to develop strategies for promoting greater equity and transparency in government spending.