GINI Coefficients and Curves,
Washington State 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 Washington States’ House of Representatives
for the years 2024 and 2025. The data used on this page were for candidates who
won their 2024 general elections.
Contributions were aggregated by member-by-contributor. This aggregation
is not completely accurate as it depends upon consistent spelling of
contributor names. 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 Washington State Public Disclosure Commission. Data for each district were extracted using
the software program MySQL together with some Python
|
|
Washington State |
|
Nbr of aggregated contributions |
11,558 |
|
Total contributions |
$10,302,224 |
|
Total for
Republicans |
$3,788,365 |
|
Total for
Democrats |
$6,513,858 |
|
Average Contribution |
$891 |
|
Average of GINI Coefficients |
0.55 |
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 98 House members came to $10.3 million;
2.
Of
this total 63% went to Democrats;
3.
The
average of the GINI coefficients calculated for all districts is 0.55.
4.
The
average contribution, aggregated by contributor by candidate, was $891.
If you compare
these data for House members in Washington State to those for House members in
Texas, another page on this website, you will see major differences.
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.