R/governors.R

In PPBDS/primer.data: Data for Preceptor's Primer for Bayesian Data Science

#' @title Election results and candidate longevity
#'
#' @description This data is from the paper "Longevity Returns to Political
#' Office" by \href{https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2019.63}{Barfort, Klemmensen &
#' Larsen (2019)}. The purpose of the study (\href{https://github.com/PPBDS/primer.data/blob/master/inst/papers/governors.pdf}{pdf})
#' was to explore how winning an election influences the lifespan of a
#' candidate. The data set purports to includes all the candidates in U.S.
#' gubernatorial elections after 1850 who were deceased as of 2012, but there
#' are clearly serious data quality issues, especially in the 1800s.
#'
#' @details First, for a given election, only the two candidates who received
#' the highest number of votes were included. Second, candidates with unknown
#' dates of death were excluded, resulting in fewer observations for elections
#' in recent years, since most recent candidates are still alive. Third, in a
#' few instances, only the year of birth or death could be determined; in these
#' cases, the date was taken to be July 1 of that year.
#'
#' @format A tibble with 3,587 observations and 13 variables:
#' \describe{
#'   \item{state}{character variable indicating the state in which an election took place}
#'   \item{year}{integer variable indicating the year in which an election took place}
#'   \item{first_name}{character variable indicating the first name of a candidate}
#'   \item{last_name}{character variable indicating the last name of a candidate}
#'   \item{party}{character variable indicating a candidate's party}
#'   \item{sex}{character variable indicating a candidate's sex}
#'   \item{died}{date variable indicating the candidate's date of death}
#'   \item{status}{character variable indicating whether a candidate was the challenger or incumbent}
#'   \item{win_margin}{double variable indicating the percentage margin by which the election was won
#'                     (positive values) or lost (negative values)}
#'   \item{region}{character variable indicating region of the country:
#'   'Midwest', 'Northeast', 'South', or 'West'}
#'   \item{election_age}{years a candidate lived before the election took place}
#'   \item{death_age}{years a candidate lived}
#'   \item{lived_after}{years a candidate lived after the election took place}
#' }
#'
#' @author David Kane
#'
#' @source \url{https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IBKYRX}
#'
"governors"