Readers may find this of interest. As part of a project on vote-trading (aka logrolling) Matt and I are working on, the below is a picture of the
Senate Chamber seats with the color scaled to the
amount of pork-barrel spending in millions of dollars.
It is much easier to see if you click on the image itself. 
Here is the same map, this time scaled according to the number of years in the Senate:
A map based on the number of pork projects is almost identical to the pork spending map at the top. I'm surprised that tenure map doesn't look more similar to the spending map. Any thoughts?
Here is the same map, this time scaled according to the number of years in the Senate:
A map based on the number of pork projects is almost identical to the pork spending map at the top. I'm surprised that tenure map doesn't look more similar to the spending map. Any thoughts?
3 comments:
What definition of pork are you using? Since pork is such small potatoes compared to the entire budget (about 0.5% if you use the CAGW definition), my guess is that those with tenure are more interested in funneling the other 99.5% of the budget to their constituents.
The pork spending data comes from Citizens Against Government Waste:
http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reports_pigbook2008
It is their tabulations based on the supplemental spending bill.
"my guess is that those with tenure are more interested in funneling the other 99.5% of the budget to their constituents."
Perhaps, I think that is an interesting point. It is not clear to me whether or not we should expect that there be any substitution. We'll look into it.
Post a Comment