House Expenditures by State During the Covid Pandemic
How did the Covid pandemic change the way that state representatives spend money as an entire state and was there a difference between pre Covid spending and during Covid spending? This is a question that I was curious about answering when I looked at the House expenditure data. I also see what years prior to Covid looked like when looking at House representative spending. My original hypothesis for this question was that the house representatives would be spending less during Covid because everyone in the country was quarantined. I contradicted my own thoughts and considered the idea that the representatives might have to spend more to counteract all the issues and problems that came with Covid.
I started my research by looking at spending between the years 2020 (when Covid started) through 2022. I combined many data frames, as well as grouping the amount of money spent by each state. All of this would enable me to create a geographical map of the United States where I could see the total spending per state in a better visual form. One realization I had while creating these visualizations was that it was unfair to just show total spending because certain states have more representatives than others so the states with the most representatives are going to spend the most. Basically, it would be showing which states had the largest populations because the amount of house representatives per state is based on population, so states like California, Texas, and New York would be shown to spend the most. To counter act this issue I created a value called spending per representative which allowed each state to be judged equally. Here was my visualization for state spending per house representatives during Covid.
Looking at this visualization, we can see that many of these states stay within the same ranges of each other when we divide by the number of representatives. Some surprising states that spent a lot were Maine with $4,718,903 and Mississippi with about $4,607,710. These are so notable because they are small states. When I originally made this graph without dividing by representatives, the only states that were highlighted were California, Texas, and Florida, so I feel that this is both more fair as well as more realistic than just looking at total spending by the state.
For my second visualization (geographical map), I used the same number of years before Covid as I did for the total time during Covid. I used the years 2017–2019. I did the same type of analysis as I did on the graph above so that there was no difference between the graphs and data. Here is what my map looked like.
There are two very noticeable differences between the first map and this second map. The first difference is that some of the states are missing data. The states that are missing are Alaska, Montana, New Mexico, and Delaware. I am not exactly sure why this is happening, but I do have a couple of theories. One theory is that there was no spending by these states during this time and the representatives were kept off the disbursements. Another theory is that the data somehow got lost in the transfer when I merged the states and disbursements data, and I think this theory is more likely but honestly, I found exactly what I needed with or without these states data. The second big difference between this map of state spending before Covid and the map of state spending during Covid is the fact that the states are not nearly as dark green as the first map. This means that the states were not spending as much before Covid. This is fascinating to look at both graph’s side by side and noticing the difference. To double check that representatives were spending more during Covid, I created a quick bar graph to check. Here it is.
What we can see now is that almost every state spent more in the years during Covid and that my hypothesis that I originally stated was wrong, the representatives spent more. I also just used total spending this time because what mattered here was difference for each state, not difference between states during the time.
In conclusion, my examination of state representatives’ spending during the pandemic gave me surprising insights, different to my original hypotheses. Through lots of analysis and visualization, it was evident that spending increased during the crisis, challenging preconceived notions. Adjusting for representation disparities revealed previously overlooked states as significant spenders. While some issues with my data occurred, the overall trend still showed a marked uptick in spending, reflecting the unique challenges faced. Moving forward, I wish to find deeper exploration some of the reasons for increased expenditures.
