Learning Stats 1: Republicans lie way more than Democrats (p-value 0.0007)

In this new internet world we can look at people statements and try to use that knowledge to see if who is trying to lie to us, con us, hurt us or take are money. If we find such people or organizations it is not always clear what to do, but we can vote for a different party, or buy from a different company. In the internet world it's pretty easy to get the data as it floats around.

Here is a dataset from the New York TImes,  culled from politifact, (which I personally think obsess a little on provable details to the expense of big important lies). lets look at the chart:

Obviously some of the names at the bottom with the least lies are the Democrats, and the names at the top with the most lies are Republicans. But the NYT often succumbs to views of the shape of the earth differ reporting, and so didn't label the parties of the politicians, and titled the article "All Politicians Lie. Some Lie More Than Others." So lets do some labeling and see how it differs by party* (csv file here) and put it into R studio to quantify this. (Thanks to the internet that is now your external brain, and Mike Marin posting new memories for you on youtube here is a nice video to tell you how)

> t.test(Which_party_lies$Mostly.False.and.Worse ~ Which_party_lies$Party, mu=0, alternative = "two.sided", conf=0.95, var.equal = F, paired = F)
Welch Two Sample t-test
data:Which_party_lies$Mostly.False.and.Worse by Which_party_lies$Party
t = -4.5566, df = 11.802, p-value = 0.0006868
alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
-36.48342 -12.84991
sample estimates:
mean in group D mean in group R
26.3333351.00000 

i.e The null hypothesis is that party identification has no impact on lying is rejected with a p-value of 0.0007.  - Party identification has an impact on how often politicians lie.

Which party lies more, and how much more? If the above table didn't convince you, a quick plot makes it obvious

> boxplot(Which_party_lies$Mostly.False.and.Worse ~ Which_party_lies$Party, main = "% Mostly False and Worst Lies by US Political Party", ylab = "% Statements Mostly False and Worse", xlab = "Party Affliation", col = c("blue", "red"))
Sometimes some colors make it a bit more obvious... Republicans lie on average of those looked at > half of the time, Democrats only about a quarter of the time, with a corresponding increase in the committment to truth.

Sometimes some colors make it a bit more obvious... Republicans lie on average of those looked at > half of the time, Democrats only about a quarter of the time, with a corresponding increase in the committment to truth.

 

One last thing - how much does our new president lie? Donald Trump had 69% of 342 statements labelled mostly false or worse. With this we can now help the NYT redo their headline: "All Politicians lie, but Republicans lie most, (p-value 0.0007) lying greater than half the time, with President elect Trump lying 69% of the time, so don't trust Mr Trump or other Republicans when they say anything."

Notes:

  • When typing in the data I almost made a mistake on Ben Carson as he has 0 truthful statements which meant I got all my data in the wrong column the first time.
  • Martin O'Malley is interesting in that he (although solidly in the democrats don't lie much camp) is the only person here with no true comments, and no pants on fire, so I presume he is being too political to say a fact straight?- Come on Martin, tell us how it is!
  • Here is a link to the csv file