COVID did not cut political spending evenly — it stopped each category in an entirely different way. In 2020, spending on air travel and trips collapsed to a fifth of the 2019 level (index 19), while fixed costs such as office operations (111) did not budge at all. In a year when nearly everything stopped, what stopped and what stayed put was left etched on the receipts like a natural experiment — the character of spending that would normally be lumped together into one mass was honestly split apart in the face of an external shock.
How the spending curve bent in 2020
Lawmakers must report how they spend political funds to the National Election Commission, and those expenditure records are public. We regrouped them by purpose and converted each into an index, setting the same 2019 category at 100. The point is to see, on one screen, where five strands that all started at 100 scattered in the first pandemic year. A grain invisible behind a single line — ‘political spending fell’ — surfaces the moment you pull the categories apart.
The categories whose feet were tied — the collapse of movement
The most dramatic drop was in movement. Spending on air travel and trips fell to 19% of the 2019 level — effectively a fifth. Transit costs such as taxis and rail also dropped by half (53). Even meeting meals, the cost of sitting down to eat with people, declined gently to 96. The scene of an era when face-to-face contact and travel ground to a halt is lodged directly in the numbers.
What matters is that the three drops are not equal. Air travel and trips (19) all but evaporated; transit (53) merely halved; meals (96) barely moved. Even within the same act of ‘meeting people,’ a far-flung trip by plane could be postponed wholesale, while short taxi and rail hops were half-unavoidable, and a single meal only trimmed its headcount and otherwise carried on. The function of distance — the farther the contact, the harder it was cut — reveals itself in the order of the drops.
The categories that did not budge — and the election as a confounder
Conversely, some things did not budge at all. Fixed costs (111) such as office rent and upkeep went out regardless of social distancing, and publicity and texts actually rose to 114. That these categories ran above normal in a year when activity stopped looks, at first glance, like a contradiction.
But a confounder unrelated to COVID is mixed in here. In April 2020 came the 21st general election. In an election year, election-related spending such as leaflets and text messages structurally swells. So the 2020 rise in publicity (114) should be read as a result mixed with an election effect, not COVID. Unless you honestly separate, within the same year, what COVID cut from what the election added, it is easy to fall into the wrong first-pass reading — ‘even in a pandemic, publicity spending rose.’ Fixed costs (111), by contrast, have no such external variable: rent and upkeep go out wherever a lawmaker is and whatever stops.
What this table measures — two kinds of spending the shock pulled apart
What makes this table valuable is that COVID drew, on our behalf, a line between two things that normally would not have separated. As distancing brought movement to a halt, a clear split emerged between ‘customary’ spending that could vanish without parliamentary work missing a beat — like air travel and trips (19) and transit (53) — and ‘essential’ spending that goes out no matter what, like office operations (111). In an ordinary year’s report both are summed into a single line called ‘expenditure,’ with no way to tell which is dispensable and which is unavoidable.
An external shock forces that sum apart. In a normal year you cannot tell from the data alone which spending is ‘customary’ and which is ‘essential,’ because both go out in similar amounts every year. But once an exogenous variable like the pandemic shaved nearly 90% off one side (movement), the side that was shaved away and the side that held to the end become distinguishable at last. This index, then, measures less the lawmakers’ ‘behavior’ than how postponable each kind of spending was in the face of a shock. It is a classifying line the natural experiment drew for us.
Why the recovery was asymmetric — the new normal air travel left behind
After the pandemic eased, recovery was not uniform across categories. As distancing lifted, transit and meals largely returned to their old levels between 2021 and 2022. Yet one category never recovered its former level — air travel and trips.
Air travel and trips remained at 41 even in 2022. Having fallen to a fifth, it then stalled at less than half its old level. Set against transit and meals, which returned to near 100 in the same span, the asymmetry of the recovery is stark. It reads as the result of video conferencing permanently replacing some trips. Once meetings that no longer required flying out had settled in, a portion of them did not come back even after distancing ended.
Even though the pandemic passed, part of the way of working it changed settled into the political-funding ledger as a new normal. The shock was temporary, but among the classification it exposed — postponable spending versus indispensable spending — the side that could be postponed, when it came time to refill, was not refilled as much as before.
Why look at this time series? Political-fund spending is meant to be public, yet disclosed records usually survive only as annual totals, with ‘what changed and how’ invisible. Pull the categories apart and stand them on the same starting line (2019 = 100), and the grain the totals hide comes into view — what COVID cut is separated from what the election added, dispensable spending splits from unavoidable spending, and the one category that never came back after the shock becomes visible. None of this is something a single line of totals would ever tell you.
Method & source · From political-funding accounting reports (expenditure records) disclosed by the National Election Commission, tallied separately by purpose (category), with annual amounts per category indexed to 2019 = 100. In 2020 the 21st general election overlapped, so the increase in publicity and texts carries an election effect unrelated to COVID, as noted. The figures are an overall aggregate and do not point to any particular lawmaker. This tally covers political-fund spending categories and differs in scope from this site’s map (meal venues).