In hrbrmstr/voteogram: United States House and Senate Voting Cartogram Generators

knitr::opts_chunk$set(fig.retina=2)

voteogram

U.S. House and Senate Voting Cartogram Generators

Description

'ProPublica' https://projects.propublica.org/represent/ makes United States Congress member votes available and has developed their own unique cartogram to visually represent this data as has 'GovTrack' . Tools are provided to retrieve voting data, prepare voting data for plotting with 'ggplot2', create vote cartograms and theme them.

Ref: (these are replicated below)

• https://projects.propublica.org/represent/votes/115/senate/1/110
• https://projects.propublica.org/represent/votes/115/house/1/256
• https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/115-2017/h256

You can grab the results of a roll call vote (House or Senate) with roll_call(). It returns a list with a ton of information that you can use outside this package. One element of that list is the data.frame of vote results. You can pass in the entire object to either _carto() function and it'll "fortify" it before shunting it off to ggplot2. Try to cache this data (I do, below, in R markdown chunk) as you're ticking credits off of ProPublica's monthly free S3 allotment each call. Consider donating to them if you're too lazy to cache the data).

TODO

• House cartogram generator
• Param bulletproofing (param checking, et al)
• Add in ability to retrieve votes from ProPublica.
• Make a voteogram theme
• GovTrack Senate cartogram polygons (this is pretty much covered in ggparliament since GT only has the seat view for the Senate)
• "Independent" colors for "not voting" & "present"
• Vignette
• htmlwidget version

What's In The Tin

The following functions are implemented:

• house_carto: Produce a ProPublica- or GovTrack-style House roll call vote cartogram
• senate_carto: Produce a Senate cartogram
• roll_call: Get Voting Record for House or Senate By Number, Session & Roll Call Number

Helpers:

• theme_voteogram: voteogram ggplot2 theme
• print.pprc: Better default 'print' function for roll_call() (pprc) objects
• fortify.pprc : In case you want to use the voting data frame from a roll_call() (pprc) object in your own plots and forget to just $votes it out. #helping

Working with voteogram

Installation

remotes::install_github("hrbrmstr/voteogram")

options(width=120)

Basic Usage

library(voteogram)
library(hrbrthemes)
library(ggplot2)

# current verison
packageVersion("voteogram")

sen <- roll_call("senate", 115, 1, 110)
rep <- roll_call("house", 115, 1, 256)

str(sen)

sen$votes

str(rep)

fortify(rep)

ProPublica

senate_carto(sen) +
  labs(title="Senate Vote 110 - Invokes Cloture on Neil Gorsuch Nomination") +
  theme_ipsum_rc(plot_title_size = 24) +
  theme_voteogram()

house_carto(rep, pp_square=TRUE) +
  labs(x=NULL, y=NULL, 
       title="House Vote 256 - Passes American Health Care Act,\nRepealing Obamacare") +
  theme_ipsum_rc(plot_title_size = 24) +
  theme_voteogram()

house_carto(rep, pp_square=FALSE) +
  labs(x=NULL, y=NULL, 
       title="House Vote 256 - Passes American Health Care Act,\nRepealing Obamacare") +
  theme_ipsum_rc(plot_title_size = 24) +
  theme_voteogram()

GovTrack

house_carto(rep, "gt") +
  labs(x=NULL, y=NULL, 
       title="House Vote 256 - Passes American Health Care Act,\nRepealing Obamacare") +
  theme_ipsum_rc(plot_title_size = 24) +
  theme_voteogram()

Tiny Cartograms

They can be shrunk down well (though that means annotating them in some other way):

senate_carto(sen) + theme_voteogram(legend=FALSE)

house_carto(rep) + theme_voteogram(legend=FALSE)

house_carto(rep, pp_square=TRUE) + theme_voteogram(legend=FALSE)

Test Results

library(voteogram)
library(testthat)

date()

test_dir("tests/")

Code of Conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

hrbrmstr/voteogram documentation built on March 12, 2023, 8:06 a.m.