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Partisan Conflict Index

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from to Reset Dates REAL GRGDP 2014 Q2 100.1% Notes: Average of 1990 = 100. Shaded areas indicate NBER recessions.







Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

The Partisan Conflict Index tracks the degree of political disagreement among U.S. politicians at the federal level by measuring the frequency of newspaper articles reporting disagreement in a given month. Higher index values indicate greater conflict among political parties, Congress, and the President.

The index is an outgrowth of recent Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia research that finds that the index tends to increase near elections and during debates over such contentious policies as the debt ceiling and health-care reform. Research suggests that increased partisan conflict increases uncertainty among firms and households. Such uncertainty has been shown to slow economic activity by delaying business investment and consumer spending.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia will update the Partisan Conflict Index monthly to allow researchers to continue to test this theory by observing how the indicator moves in relation to the salient economic policy issues of the day.

To calculate each month’s index value, keyword searches are conducted on major U.S. newspapers, including the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Wall Street Journal. The initial release includes monthly data from January 1981 through September 2014.

A complete list of sources and details on the construction of the index can be found in “Partisan Conflict,” a working paper by Marina Azzimonti, a former Philadelphia Fed economist who is now an associate professor at Stony Brook University.

View the Philadelphia Fed Economic Release Calendar for future releases of the Partisan Conflict Index.

PCI Data Last update: , at 8:30 a.m. ET

Excel spreadsheet

Note: An incorrect index value for September 2014 has been corrected in the above spreadsheet and graph.

Resources

The Partisan Conflict Index is an outgrowth of research detailed in Azzimonti, Marina (2014), “Partisan Conflict,” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper 14-19 .

Additional analysis is available in Azzimonti, Marina (2018), “Partisan Conflict and Private Investment,” Journal of Monetary Economics 93, pp. 114–131.