GINI Coefficients and Curves, Texas
House Districts, 2024
The version
of ScatterBrain (Javascript)
in this section has been slightly modified to display a data set that contains campaign
contribution to members of Texas’ House of Representatives for the year 2024.
The data used on this page were for candidates who won their 2024 general
elections. Data for two House members, HD 24 and HD 130, were not included, due
to some technical issues with them, probably related to my own ignorance.
The contribution data are for contributions made during the
year 2024. Contributions were aggregated by member-by-contributor. This
aggregation is not completely accurate as it depends upon consistent spelling
of contributor names. As an example, something like 15 variations of the name
of the PAC associated with the firm Moak Casey in Texas (e.g., Moak Casey, Moak
& Casey, Moak-Casey, etc.) were
noted. These would show up as separate contributors and would work to reduce
the values of GINI Coefficients based on the associated data. The aggregation
process puts the focus on the member-contributor process, rather than keeping
the detail on each contrition made to a member by a single contributor. The
problem of name ambiguity is not present on the candidate side, as the
candidate identification number was used for them.
The contribution data for each House district were used to
calculate the GINI coefficients of the distributions of the contribution for
each district. The presentation obtained by clicking on Item 2 to the left will
display two graphs. The left-hand (LH)
graph displays the Gini Coefficients on the vertical axis, the percentage of
contributions for each district attributable to the top 5% of contributors in each
corresponding district on the horizontal axis.
The following table displays some summary data for the contributions
contained in the data set used. The raw
data were downloaded from the website of the Texas Ethics Commission. Data for each district were extracted using
the software program MySQL together with some Python
|
|
Texas |
|
Nbr of aggregated contributions |
42,602 |
|
Total contributions |
$89,553,326 |
|
Total for
Republicans |
$74,590,247 |
|
Total for
Democrats |
$14,963,079 |
|
Average Contribution |
$2,099 |
|
Average GINI Coefficients |
0.75 |
programming script. The GINI indexes were calculated within
the Python code and the cumulative percentages of contributions and donors were
also calculated by the Python code for each district.
Interesting observations based on the table summaries are:
1.
Total
contributions to these 148 House members came to $89.6 million;
2.
Of
this total 83% went to Republicans;
3.
The
average of the GINI coefficients calculated for all districts is 0.75.
4.
The
average contribution, aggregated by contributor by candidate, was $2,099.
By way of comparison, similar calculations were performed for
the House members in the State of Washington. The average contribution in
Washington was $891, much lower than in Texas.
The average of all of the GINI coefficients in Washington was 0.55, as compared
to 0.75 in Texas. Further, the percentage of total contributions going to the majority
party (Democrats in Washington) was 63%, as opposed to the 83% going to
Republicans in Texas. The State of Washington has strict limits on how much can
be given to individual candidates, likely accounting for the substantial differences
in average contributions and the values of the GINI coefficients between the
two states.
When an individual House district is selected (by clicking on
the [Hlt/Sel] button at the bottom of the display and
then selecting a district from the drop-down list with the initial label “HDNAME”),
the amounts given by individual contributors to that House member can be displayed.
Alternatively, with the [Multi] button clicked on, turning it red, and with the
previously referred to button [Hlt/Sel] turned off or
white, all of the points/contributions can highlighted
and summary data presented by using the mouse to create a rectangle around a
single point. (See instructions).
If you succeed in displaying the graphs showing the GINI
coefficients (LH) and their associated curves on the right, you will see a
large range. If all contributions to an
individual candidate were of the same amount, the GINI coefficient would be
equal to 0.0 . If all of the contributions came from a
single donor, the coefficient would be equal to 1.0. As you can see in the LH graph, some of the
GINI coefficients are very close to one.
The greatest GINI has a value of 0.983 for Representative Gary Gates in
district 28. Of the total contributions
to Rep. Gates of $682,199 it appears that $617,000 were from himself (90.4%). A
number of others with very high GINI coefficients, 0.85 and 0.95 were those who
received substantial out-of-state funding from Jeff Yass of Pennsylvania, channeled
through Governor Abbott and the AFC Victory fund. Most of the amounts channeled
through the AFC Fund, associated with Betsy Devos, were used to buy negative
campaign ads in opposition to members who had refused to vote in support of
school vouchers in previous campaigns.
It appears that 12 of those who were thus targeted were actually
defeated.
The program is
initiated by clicking on Item 2 at the left.
Items 3 – 7
at the left contain instructions for using the program. Click on the black
arrows to show the individual steps in each case. Also, the special
instructions tailored to this modified version of the software are available by
clicking on the button [Supl. Instr.].
Last point:
Clicking on the button labelled [LHG} twice will place a graph in the LH side
that permits selecting House districts by party—Republican or Democrat.