Economic Performance by Party in the White House
The Republican and Democratic parties each have a brand that helps to define what people believe they represent. One of the strong Republican brand attributes is the notion that their policies are good for business. I was curious to see if the economy’s performance under Republican administrations outperformed the economy’s performance under Democratic administrations and supported the claim.
Obviously there is no one metric that can be used to measure the health of the economy, but GDP is generally recognized to be the best overall barometer. In my analysis I also included the growth of imports, exports, private domestic investment as well as growth in non-military federal government spending. The numbers represent the percentage change from the previous year and include the years 1930-2007. The numbers are available from the government agency the Bureau of Economic Analysis (source at the bottom).
- Economic Performance by Party in the White House
The blue and red background on the below chart indicate if a Republican (Red) or a Democrat (Blue) was in the White House. The Y-Axis indicates the percentage change from the previous year’s GDP.
Chart of GDP Performance by Party in the White House
GDP by nature is a trailing indicator, so I think it is legitimate to attribute some of the economy’s performance to the preceding party. In the below chart I attributed the first two years of the economy’s performance to the previous party’s administration. See results below.
Economic Performance by Party in the White House - Two year shift
A strong case can be made that the economy during WWII should be considered a statistical outlier. I’m not sure if necessarily agree, but was curious what the results would be if those years were removed.
Economic Performance by Presidential Party (less WWII)
Conclusion:
In every scenario the economy under Democratic administrations outperforms the economy under Republican administrations by the above metrics. I don’t know if this is a strongly related causal relationship but statistically the economy has performed better under Democratic administrations.
As always, comments and suggestions are welcomed.
Download the .xls with the analysis here.
http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/SelectTable.asp?Selected=Y
6 Responses to “Economic Performance by Party in the White House”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe
You can subscribe by email to receive newsletter updates:
Subscribe through a RSS feed reader
-
- AnotherDamn CafePress Shop
Politi-comedy on a T-Shirt!
- AnotherDamn CafePress Shop
According to your GDP graph the economy was better during the great depression than during WWII. Yet the people of America had more jobs, food, clothes…during WWII. There must be a better way to rate the status of the economy at a given time.
I will try to add a couple additional metrics that can be used to measure the economies performance.
The chart is the % change in GDP from the previous year. That shows the momentum of the economy, starting from where the economy was in 1929 it had a lot of room to improve. Hence the significant percentage increases.
now do it showing which party was in charge of the purse strings.
Thats the real question. I think youll see the opposite. and Bush has had both parties in power and the economy did grow under bushes first 6 years. With republican rule. And went to crap whens dems took over.
It would be interesting to see how the economy when different parties where in control of congress.
I think it would be a fairly safe argument to make that a lot of the economic growth we saw during the beginning of the Bush years was due to the forming of the housing crisis that we are now reaping the benefits of. To be fair, part of the reason so much economic success was enjoyed under Clinton was due to the Internet boom. I guess the real question is what you do with the proceeds of that boom? Clinton left with a budget surplus, Bush spent it all and then some.
[...] June, before 150,000 jobs were wiped out in just a few months’ time) to stock performance, to overall GDP growth. We have a very steep climb ahead of us to get out of this economic crisis, and I will place my [...]
That’s a very nice economic performance report.