Many Americans are not the most trustworthy of the U.S. House of Representatives Members’ expenditures. With good reason, this is a very valid belief that some Americans hold. The U.S. House of Representative Statement of Disbursements (SOBs) are quarterly statements that include data for each member’s receipts and expenditures. If you would like to learn more about these statements you can find out more basic SOBs information here. It is important to investigate the amounts and types of spending that the U.S. House of Representatives Members are doing, as Americans’ taxpayer dollars are what funds these expenditures. In addition, it is well known that America’s current political climate is very polarized. Having the ability to look at differences in spending between parties may help paint a clearer picture of what United States politicians are doing with taxpayer dollars.
Using quarterly data from 2021, this analysis attempts to look at the most common expenditure types or categories and within these categories, what percentage of democrat and republican members were investigated. Then, among gender and party, what are the total sums for the most common expenditure category. For this analysis, it is important to consider how these categories, political party and gender, are not of the same size. To reduce this effect, the data were compared to the total size of each category (female democrats, male democrats, female republicans, and male republicans). This makes the data a bit more comparable to each other. Without accounting for this effect for just the amount of travel categories, it appears that democrats had higher amounts of travel. After accounting for this effect, (looking at just the percentages per party), it was found that republicans used the travel category slightly more (~1%) than democrats. The democrats’ party percentage for travel expenditures was 93.67% and the republicans’ party percentage for travel expenditures was 94.69%. This means that 93.67% of democrats had travel related expenditures and 94.69% of republicans had travel related expenditures. This shows that there really is not much of a significant difference between party expenditures on travel, they are roughly the same. Therefore, it seems that regardless of political party, congress people tend to have travel related expenses as the most common expenditure category for 2021.
Now not only looking through the lens of just political parties, the next thing to consider is if gender plays a role at all in determining how often travel related expenditures are recorded for 2021. Now separating the data into the categories: female democrats, male democrats, female republicans, and male republicans, we can compare the influence of gender by political party. By finding the amount of females and males per each party, the percentages of gender by political party for the travel category were derived. The percentages for all of the listed four categories broken down by gender and political party were all 100%. This means that there were not any strong indications that there are variances between the gender of the house member and their political party.
Now, what about how much each party and gender are actually spending? Well the results show that there is quite a difference in terms of just looking at the cost per member for each category. For travel, females who are democrats on average spent $6,383,919.32, male democrats spent an average of $7,059,077.92, female republicans spent an average of $4,074,235.20, and republican males spent an average of $6,003,743.76. Male democrats spent the most on travel on average, followed by female democrats, male republicans, and lastly female republicans for 2021 data.
With all of these observations in mind, we can make some arguments based on the results. First of all, there does not seem to be a significant difference between how many democrats and republicans had travel related expenditures, with a slightly higher rate (~1%) for republicans. There were also no notable differences in terms of gender and political party. Lastly, there are however noticeable differences in terms of per person spending by gender and political party. The biggest to least travel spenders tend to be male democrats, female democrats, male republicans, and female republicans. All in all, this analysis gave some insights on how there are some differences between party and gender spending for travel expenditures.
