Several articles in the past few years have analyzed Democratic and Republican administrations, comparing standard measures of national economic health - production, unemployment, inflation, the stock market, etc. - and standard measures of government efficiency - amount of Federal spending, number of Federal employees, deficit reduction, etc. Remarkably, by every measure of economic health and government efficiency, the analyses show that Democratic administrations, on average, outperform Republican administrations. Anyone who is interested in looking at comparisons of economic performance and government efficiency during Democratic and Republican administrations should take a few minutes to read these articles; they are all interesting and short:

Michael Kinsley
Carol Vinzant
Kevin Drum
Dwight Meredith (1)
Dwight Meredith (2)

One economic measure these articles don't address is poverty. If Democratic administrations are associated with better economic conditions, as these articles indicate, then it's reasonable to expect this fact to be reflected in a greater reduction of poverty under Democratic leadership. To test this assumption, I examined the U.S. Census poverty data for the years 1961 through 2000. As Dwight Meredith noted in his articles, this period lets us compare 20 years of Democratic administrations and 20 years of Republican administrations. (The Census poverty data currently available actually runs from 1959 through 2004. However, if we include the Republican years 1959-1960 and 2001-2004 in the analysis, it makes the averages even worse for Republicans; thus the choice not to include those years in the analysis certainly does not bias the results against Republicans.)

Examining the Census data, what I found was this: during the 20 years of Republican administrations, each year on average the number of Americans living below the poverty line rose by 416,400, while during the 20 years of Democratic administrations, each year on average this number fell by 829,900. I then applied the analysis suggested in Michael Kinsley's article: I credited each year's performance to the previous year's administration. In this analysis, during the years credited to Republican administrations, the number of Americans below the poverty line rose 371,095 on average each year, while during the years credited to Democratic administrations, this number fell 845,421 on average each year.

The performance results also favor Democrats if we look at the poverty rate - the percent of the total population below the poverty line. The poverty rate fell on average 0.58 percent each year of Democratic administrations, while poverty rose on average 0.036 percent each year of Republican administrations. If we assign credit to the previous year's administration, the poverty rate fell on average 0.59 percent each year credited to Democratic administrations, and rose on average 0.012 percent each year credited to Republican administrations.

The period of recent history that saw, by far, the most dramatic poverty reduction was 1961-1969. Yet Republicans to this day deride Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty." What a pity for our country that one of America's great success stories - the 1960's anti-poverty effort - has been grossly mischaracterized as a failure - and that so many Americans now believe this false story about their country rather than the truth.

While it's often said that past performance is no guarantee of future performance, it does seem as if history may be a pretty good predictor of the performance of Democratic and Republican administrations. Under the current Republican administration, poverty is once again on the rise.

Note: posted originally, with charts, here on my site DemocraticShortList.com