README.md

In RStelzle/rstfuns: A Collection Of Functions I Wrote For Various Projects Of Mine

rstfuns - My personal R-Package

This is my personal R-Package containing various short functions I wrote for various projects, mostly concerning topics of political science. My main reasons for writing this package are a) to have written a R package once and b) to have an easy, transparent and reproducible way of reusing code between project. The idea for this small package was born after I read this great blog-post by Hilary Parker. This other post of hers was a great help.

Installation:

Installation of rstfuns requires devtools. If devtools is installed rstfuns can be installed using:

devtools::install_github("https://github.com/RStelzle/rstfuns", dependencies = T)
library(rstfuns)

Available functions:

Roll-Call-Data:

Roll-Call-Data is one of the workhorse-data-sources of the sociology of legaslatures, as it is -depending on the legislative body of interest- relatively accessible. One topic of interest to be tackled with Roll-Call-Data might be cohesion or discipline (for a distinction of the two see Özbudun (1970)) of parliamentary groups. For questions of this kind rstfuns contains two functions calc_attina_index() and calc_rice_index(). Both indices can be used to measure cohesion within a set of legislators for a given vote.

That being said, Roll-Call-Data should not be analysed without a word of caution: As roll-call-votes are in most cases not staged randomly, any inferences taken from a sample of roll-call-votes on the population of all votes are built on shaky grounds. For a great overview see Carrubba et al. (2006).

calc_attina_index()

With M being the count of votes given for the option with the most votes and N being the total count of votes given, including votes to abstain.

calc_attina_index() is used to calculate “Attina’s index of agreement” (see Attina 1990, 564f.). Attina’s index of agreement can be used for votes with the option to abstain from the vote, like in the European Paraliament. calc_attina_index() takes a vector (max. length() = 3) of the amount/share of votes for “yes”, “no” and “abstain”. When the vector is shorter than length() = 3 it is assumed that no legislators voted for the missing option(s).

Attina’s index of agreement results values from -33.333 to 100. A value of 100 represents a unanimous vote. Positive values result, if more than half of the votes were casted for one and the same option. -33.33 means, that equal shares of legislatures voted for “yes”, “no” and “abstain”.

calc_attina_index() takes the optional argument rescale (default = FALSE). If set to TRUE, calc_attina_index()’s results get rescaled to a scale of 0-1 (for exaple used in Hix, Noury, and Roland (2005)). A value of 0.25 now represents that 50% of the values were casted for one of the options.

calc_rice_index()

With P being the count of “Yes”-, C the count of “No” and N the total count of votes.

calc_rice_index() is used to calculate the “Rice Index” as defined in Rice (1925, 62f.). It can be used for votes without an option to abstain. Therefore calc_rice_index() only takes a vector of max. length() = 2. The Rice Index varies between 1 (all votes where casted for the same option) and 0 (votes where evenly split between “yes” and “no”).

Utility stuff

plot_turnout_parlgov()

rstfuns::plot_turnout_parlgov(c("Germany", "Poland", "France", "United Kingdom"), german = F)

plot_turnout_parlgov() can be used for quick and dirty plotting of election turnout in countries. Data from the ParlGov Database (Döring and Manow 2019) is used. The function takes one optional argument. If set to german = T countrynames will be translated to German and “and” will be replaced by “und”.

enumerate()

enumerate() can be used to print all entries of a vector to one large string enumerating all entries and adding “and” before the last entry. The optional argument german = T changes “and” to “und”. The optional argument oxford = T adds an additional (oxford-) comma before the “and”.

rstfuns::enumerate(c("Germany", "Italy", "Poland"))

## [1] "Germany, Italy and Poland"

References

Attina, Fulvio. 1990. “The Voting Behaviour of the European Parliament Members and the Problem of the Europarties.” *Eur J Political Res* 18 (5): 557–79. .

Carrubba, Clifford J., Matthew Gabel, Lacey Murrah, Ryan Clough, Elizabeth Montgomery, and Rebecca Schambach. 2006. “Off the Record: Unrecorded Legislative Votes, Selection Bias and Roll-Call Vote Analysis.” *Brit. J. Polit. Sci.* 36 (4): 691–704. .

Döring, Holger, and Philip Manow. 2019. “Parliaments and Governments Database (ParlGov): Information on Parties, Elections and Cabinets in Modern Democracies. Development Version.” http://www.parlgov.org/.

Hix, Simon, Abdul Noury, and Gérard Roland. 2005. “Power to the Parties: Cohesion and Competition in the European Parliament, 19792001.” *British Journal of Political Science* 35 (2): 209–34. .

Özbudun, Ergun. 1970. “Party Cohesion in Western Democracies: A Causal Analysis.” *Sage Professional Papers in Comparative Politics* 1 (6): 303–88.

Rice, Stuart A. 1925. “The Behavior of Legislative Groups: A Method of Measurement.” *Political Science Quarterly* 40 (1): 60–72. .

RStelzle/rstfuns documentation built on Oct. 3, 2020, 4:06 p.m.