Subject:
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Re: One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 5 Jul 2002 19:06:22 GMT
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Viewed:
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4301 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Thomas Stangl writes:
> > Oh GIVE ME A BREAK. Career politicians are from the left
> > AND right. You make it sound like every career politician
> > is a liberal. What a joke.
>
> Without knowing, I'd be willing to bet that the number of 20+
> year politicians are at least 5-1 Democratic.
This claim got me interested. I decided that a thorough analysis of the past
fifty years of US politics was beyond my level of interest. So I narrowed my
exploration to the current US Senate. I sifted and sorted some stats and came
up with:
50 Democrats
49 Republicans
The average time served by the current Democrats is 12.34 years.
The average time served by the current Republicans is 12.33 years.
I call a Longtime_Senator one who has been in office more than 12 years.
I call an Extra_Longtime_Senator one who has been in office more than 24 years.
There are currently 21 Longtime_Democrats, 19 Longtime_Republicans, 7
Extra_Longtime_Democrats, and 6 Extra_Longtime_Republicans.
The single extra Democrat does not sufficiently account for the imbalance in
the distribution, but random chance does. I didn't test John's hypothesis of
the politicians with more than 20 years in office, even within my limited
sample, but the 5:1 ratio is clearly unsupported with the Senate sample.
Of course, there are tremendous data lacking. We don't know what these
Senators did before their election to the Senate. But, I think it's generally
difficult to get into the Senate without prior political experience. I'd guess
the numbers to stay fairly close.
Not a rigorous study, but some interesting data...
Chris
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