I'm not sure this is a good question since it's projecting ~165 years of history into the present. The cumulative historical record of corruption might not have much bearing on the present levels of corruption in either party. At the very least the title would need some work to reflect what your question-body is about. Also, I'd suggest adding a history tag, but you have 5 tags already; I suggest dropping "congress".

@Fizz Do you have any suggestions as to a time-frame that would make this a reasonable question, my scripts can be adjusted, I just figured, the larger a data-set the better basis for a question?

@ChristianO.Knudsen Anything previously to around 1964 would probably confuse your numbers. In fact, I would argue that if you want to pursue this, you should probably have many more "parties" than just Republicans and Democrats. Republicans ~ 1860 are not the same group of interests as Republicans ~1960. This Wiki may be a helpful starting point for that.

@JeffLambert That distinction still leaves me with the same question, even if slightly more favorable to the Republicans, it still leaves them ~2.3x as likely as Democrats to be on that list.

Also appears to have Wikipedia's slant favoring Democrats. First two scandals searched for, Pigford and Menendez weren't listed.

I believe you're asking this in good faith, and that you genuinely want an explanation for the statistics you're seeing, but I can only see this question becoming a magnet for partisanship: Democrats will answer with "yes, of course they are" and Republicans will answer with "no, the Democrats are more corrupt". K Dog's comments are just the foreshocks of the inevitable earthquake.

@F1Krazy I'm hoping my wording in the body will, at least somewhat, counteract the partisanship, as I'm asking not for a simple yes or no, but an explanation for the numbers. A true partisan will still just answer "because they are corrupt" or "because the corrupt democrats are the source of the numbers", but I'm really hoping for some insight, or, at least, comments on my, admittedly simplistic, methods, before this happens.

@KDog The bias goes both ways, at least that's what the studies say, as pointed out in "Simple-4", if you have information to dispute that conclusion, or reasoning as to why these articles, in particular, are likely to be Democratic biased, please share.

@Fizz I tried a different title, it comes off as more party-neutral, but, I fear that it just turns my question into a request for opinions, which I believe is not considered a good question, either.

What a surprised- this question gets closed.

@Studoku There were some legitimate reasons to put it on hold, that I've tried to remedy, hopefully it'll be seen as less divisive now, even if if no-one can come up with an answer (which I, of course hope someone can), just getting other peoples point of view might help me (and other readers) come up wit more likely answers than just taking the numbers at face value.

The list on Wikipedia says explicitly: "This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness." Attempting to make a quantitative analysis of an incomplete dataset in order to draw a definitive conclusion is a waste of effort. Significantly more research would be necessary to identify all relevant incidents of corruption before concluding which party is more corrupt and then trying to conjecture as to why.

I think the basic problem here is coming up with a neutral definition of "corruption". Certainly many things that I, from a nonpartisan perspective, might consider as "corrupt" (for instance, handing out ambassadorships to political supporters) is just business as usual for both parties.

Note that involved in, caught, and convicted are all different stats...

It's also possible that since corruption is not technically illegal, some of it from Democrats goes unnoticed. The government positions of Trump's children, for example, are more obvious than the corporate position of Hunter Biden (which, if not for the Ukraine scandal, would have remained largely unknown), even though both could be pointed to as evidence of corruption.

@Joe True as that is, it does not explain the imbalance of the distribution of entries, if it was merely incomplete, you'd expect it to be as incomplete for Democrats as for Republicans.

@PlutoThePlanet This sort of ties in with the "magnitude" issue I mention in my first comment, I'll add it as "Simple-5" so people don't have to look in the comments. This is an interesting theory, but I'm not sure I can think of any way to test it, do you have any thoughts on a method?

@jamesqf In my opinion, this sort of ties in with the "magnitude" issue I mention in my first comment (as with PlutoThePlanet's comment), I've added it as "Simple-5" so people don't have to look in the comments. This is an interesting theory, but I'm not sure I can think of any way to test it, do you have any thoughts on a method?

@Displayname They are, but the the list applies the same standard to all of it's entries. This is pointed out in "Simple-3" and I can't think of a reason why it would favour one party over the other?

related: skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/43004/…

The raw number of corrupt dem/rep politicians doesn't mean anything. The percentage is what matters. For example, in a given year, let's say there are 80 republican senators, and 20 democrat senators. Of these senators, 4 republicans are corrupt, and 2 democrats are corrupt. At first glance it appears that the republicans are more corrupt, but that's only because there are simply more republicans than democrats currently in the senate. When you look at the actual percentage of republicans that are corrupt, it's only 5%, compared to 10% of the democrats.

Umm... no I wouldn't. I don't know any reason why an incomplete dataset collected by amateurs without any methodological rigor would be proportioned exactly the same way as the actual underlying distribution.

While good for most basic scientific stuff or history too old to matter, Wikipedia tends to be seriously left skewed on ideological issues and really bad in handling real controversies on touchy issues. In this moment you can be merely proving that those people have bad press (it's not about "true", but "authoritative sources") and as usual in wiki edit wars left wing activists won. If you seriously want to run such study without any agenda, better look for something less subjective than "scandal", like for example "conviction".