Simple Dataset: US Presidential Party and GDP Growth

Friday May 5, 2017

Here's a simple dataset for use in examples. It's taken from the online appendix to Presidents and the US Economy: An Econometric Exploration by Blinder and Watson.

president_gdp.csv

The fields are:

For more details, please see the paper and appendix.

The only changes I've made are to order the data chronologically and put it in the convenient CSV format.

For example, in R, you can do the following:

> data = read.csv('president_gdp.csv')
> lm(growth ~ party, data)
> t.test(growth ~ party, data)

Because the dataset is so small, I'll also display it as spaced-out text here:

term,             party,  growth
Truman,               D,    6.57
Eisenhower 1,         R,    2.72
Eisenhower 2,         R,    2.26
Kennedy-Johnson,      D,    5.74
Johnson 2,            D,    4.95
Nixon 1,              R,    3.57
Nixon-Ford,           R,    1.97
Carter,               D,    3.56
Reagan 1,             R,    3.12
Reagan 2,             R,    3.89
G.H.W. Bush,          R,    2.05
Clinton 1,            D,    3.53
Clinton 2,            D,    4.00
G.W. Bush 1,          R,    2.78
G.W. Bush 2,          R,    0.54
Obama 1,              D,    1.98