Truth Index: Local Update

In the last quarter of 2011, in my quest to find unique statistical trends from the data mining I had done of PolitiFact’s Truth-o-Meter rulings, I had assigned a field called “Local” to each of the PolitiFact rulings. As I described at the time:

What is termed “local” deals with the nature of the PolitiFact (PF) ruling. Most often it would show in the title or subtitle. It means it just relates to something having to do with the state or locality, that it’s not national. It could be ideological, but it still pertains to a local issue. None of these rulings were from PolitiFact National. Intuitively they wouldn’t, but state PolitiFact rulings can be done for an office holder of that (PolitiFact) state, while the subject of the fact-check is of national scope. In other words, without reviewing each ruling, the state rulings can't all be counted as local…

…Republicans are more truthful than Democrats….by a pretty good margin. Republicans were at a precise “zero” on the Truth Index, while the Democrats were a negative 27. There were 173 “local” rulings which represented 38% of all the PF rulings in the fourth quarter of 2011; Democrats and Republicans were also equally represented, each having 74 rulings. There were 25 rulings for which the affiliation was independent, non-partisan or just unknown.

That quarter I had 174 rulings of a local nature, and I got a somewhat surprising result in the Truth Index by party: the Republicans, as noted in the quote above from my post, were ahead, way ahead of the Democrats on the Truth Index (as compared to the Democrats normally being higher, as I have shown when you look at all rulings accumulated). I wondered whether it just an anomaly for the quarter. Although I was excited at this seeming incongruence, and confounded to determine an explanation, I still needed more data in order to confirm that this trend continued.

Click to enlarge:  The Republicans local "Pants on Fire" quintupled from 2011 to 2012, lowering their overall Truth Index.

So I now have six months of data to look at, almost 400 rulings (more than twice what I had the first time) and it seems my initial findings may have been premature….or maybe the Truth Index is functioning the way it should. In the first quarter of 2012, the Democrats have reversed the trend from the last quarter of 2011, and the Republicans reversed as well. The Democrats went from a negative 27 in the 2011 fourth quarter to a positive 11 in the 2012 first quarter for an overall average of negative 5.6. The Republicans went from an exact zero to a negative 12 for an overall average of negative 6.8. In other words, the Democrats and Republicans are statistically tied for the Truth Index average at around a negative 7 based on six months of Truth-o-Meter rulings. Compare this to a negative 13 for all rulings (well, the first 5,000) or a negative 9 for individuals.

But this also serves to prove in a sense that PolitiFact isn’t doing anything deliberately—the Truth-o-Meter goes up and it goes down, and it has nothing to do with “selecting” those statements which would benefit either side.

One of the reasons the Republicans “took a fall” this quarter was that there was a steep increase for them in Pants on Fire rulings, from two in the last quarter of 2011, to ten thus far in 2012. The pantalones en fuego ranged from such things as a statement by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie that “23 percent of kids starting ninth grade in Newark will graduate in four years” to PolitiFact Tennesee’s ruling on state representative Frank Niceley on his claim regarding the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency bringing coyotes into the state "to try to keep the deer population down." They were spread out over almost every PolitiFact state and didn’t all occur at any particular time during the quarter.

But this does show, so far, that overall, politicians appear to be a bit more truthful at a local level. I will continue to keep the “local” factor in the rulings and monitor them to get a better picture.