With the government shutdown now in its second week, everybody is offering opinions on who to blame, what the costs will be, and what policy concessions it will take to end the shutdown.
Today we consider a different angle—do the stats on government closures in the past tell us anything interesting about the current machinations in Washington. Does the math have any predictive power about how long this drama will last? Your guess is as good as ours, but here’s what the numbers tell us.
Since this revised budgeting process began in 1976, we have seen 17 previous shutdowns. This chart shows us the length of each past shutdown and the year it took place. The longest is the Dec. 1995—Jan. 1996 shutdown that lasted 21 days.
We can go further than this. We have a lot more data, and can use it to build a much more detailed story. Consider that each shutdown had a different composition of government: The party of the President, House, and Senate can vary. Are Congress and White House run by the same party or not? We can put all that together into a much denser chart:
This shows us in one place, the party of the President, the House, and if those two parties matched. Fun fact: we ended up ignoring the makeup of the Senate in this analysis because after going through all the data, we found that the party of the House, rather than the Senate, was a much more significant factor in affecting shutdown length.
We can take all this data to calculate which factors matter the most to predicting the length of a shutdown. The simplest and most efficient formula we found to explain the length is:
Shutdown Length = 1.9 – 1.8 * HP-same + 11.1 * Dem-Pres
Breaking down the equation, here is what we see:
• Start with 1.9 days as the typical length of a shutdown no matter what.
• Subtract 1.8 days if the House Majority and President are from the same party
• Add 11.1 extra days if the President is Democrat.
That’s right: the single most important factor in predicting how long a shutdown will last is if the president is a Democrat. The stats say no other factor has a bigger numerical effect.
And you can see it in the chart too: The blue shapes (Democrat Presidents) show much longer shutdowns than the red shapes.
We evaluated several other factors that didn’t end up moving the needle:
• Party makeup of House and Senate (in percentage terms)
• If the House majority party matches with the Senate
• If the President’s party matches to Senate’s majority
• Year of shutdown
• Number of prior shutdowns
• Length of previous shutdown
These factors are not significant. The only two that do matter are the President’s party, and whether the House majority and President’s parties match up.
Based on this analysis, and given the current makeup of a Republican House and a Democrat President, the numbers suggest we should expect about 13 days of shutdown (1.9 from the constant + 11.1 from a Democrat President).
No matter what ends up happening, we know one thing is true: Washington doesn’t operate with the same simplicity and logic as basic mathematical equations.
