US Partisanship and Social/Economic Outcomes Revisited

For any US members of the Nerd Tribe who are a bit undecided on the relative benefits and harms of voting in the upcoming elections, let’s take another look at whether partisan control of the 3 branches of the US government makes any difference to economic and social outcomes. Summary: Republican presidents are bad & Democratic presidents are good for the deficit as a fraction of GDP. The rest mostly doesn’t survive LASSO regularization, leave-one-out crossvalidation, and a low error rate on predictions. Conventional ‘Wisdom’ Let’s revisit the topic of whether Democratic/Republican control of the 3 branches of the US government affects economic and social welfare outcomes in each Congressional term. We’ve previously visited most of these these [1], and later remembered to include the US federal budget deficit. [2] As we said last time, the motivation here is: Conventional wisdom in the US is that Democrats are always better on social issues, but Republicans are always better on the…