Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Funding Allocation
Source Data on the current (or estimated) population of each state and territory listed in the excel spreadsheet file, and on the official results of the presidential election. Your assignment is to use this data to create visualizations that answer the following two questions
Is the allocation equitable based on the population of each of the States and Territories, or is bias apparent?
Does the allocation favor the political interests of the Biden administration?
Storyboard
- Issue: Is the allocation equitable based on location or is it bias apparent? Does the allocation favor political interests from Biden administration?
- Used provided data on Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) from March 2020 and data from Wikipedia to obtain 2020 USA population, and from Kaggle on presidential votes of 2020 for analysis.
- Created visuals to demonstrate analysis
- Answered issue, allocation is bias, and favors Trump supports.
Big idea
The 2020 IIJA funding reveals a bias where Trump supporting states (in 2020 election) were favored, instead of funding states by their population.
3-minute story
In this analysis of Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) funding, I examined the funding allocation in the United States of America based on their population and the president they supported in the presidential election of 2020. I compared the funding of the state populations and found that states that supported trump received more funding over Biden supporting states. In my analysis it was seen that states with larger populations like California had less funding per caitpa, which is a Biden supporting state; and Alaska a state with the least population has the highest funding per capita, which is a Trump supporting state. Overall the IIJA allocation is not equitable and the funding distribution may be influences by political interest than rather than being influenced by populations size and needs.
Import data and wrangle data
Data from kaggle was uploaded to github to use for the purpose of this analysis. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Andreina-A/2020USPresidentialElection/refs/heads/main/voting.csv.xls
# A tibble: 6 × 2
State Total_Funding_Billions
<chr> <dbl>
1 ALABAMA 3
2 ALASKA 3.7
3 AMERICAN SAMOA 0.0686
4 ARIZONA 3.5
5 ARKANSAS 2.8
6 CALIFORNIA 18.4
[1] "xml_document" "xml_node"
[1] "State or territory" "Census population[8][9][a]"
# A tibble: 6 × 2
State Population
<chr> <chr>
1 CALIFORNIA 39,538,223
2 TEXAS 29,145,505
3 FLORIDA 21,538,187
4 NEW YORK 20,201,249
5 PENNSYLVANIA 13,002,700
6 ILLINOIS 12,812,508
State Winner
1 ALASKA Trump
2 HAWAII Biden
3 WASHINGTON Biden
4 OREGON Biden
5 CALIFORNIA Biden
6 IDAHO Trump
Merge data
Merged data for funding, population, and elections results by states. Calculated the funding per capita for each state to make a porportional comparison within different states, as each state has different population size and receive funding based of their population size, to calculate I divided the total funding by the population size.
Data visualizations coding
Made a merged plot for population and funding per capita for each each state. The funding per captia plot is organized by descending order of the states’ population. Based on the plot it seems the states with the lowest population have the highest funding per capita, for example Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana have one of the lowest populations but have one the highest funding per capita. Overall, the allocation is not equitable as larger populated states receive less funding per capita than those states with less population.
Data Visual
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Funding Allocation by Political Support
Box plot used to visualize the distribution of funding per capita for states that supported Biden and for those that supported Trump. Based on the box plot the median funding per capita for states that supported Biden was lower than those who supported Trump, therefore the allocation of funding didn’t seem to favor the political interest of Biden administration.
Box plot
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Conclusion
The infrastructure investment jobs act allocation was not equitable based on the population of each state, as states with larger populations received less funding per capita compared to those states with less population. The analysis who that Alaska with a low populations received more funding per capita compared to California which is a state that has the highest population. In addition, IIJA allocation didn’t favor the political interest of Biden administration, as states that supported Trump received more funding.
