In rwrandles/washex-r: Washington State Legislative Explorer

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
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WashEx

The Washington Explorer (WashEx) package creates an interface between R and the Washington State Legislative Web Services. It serves as a companion to Legislative Explorer: Washington, a project developed by John Wilkerson and Rohnin Randles at the University of Washington. The package contains functions to retrieve data regarding the following:

Bill summaries
Roll calls
Amendments
Sponsors
Committees
Committee membership
Hearings
Revised Code of Washington (RCW)

Installation

You can install the released version of washex from CRAN with:

install.packages("washex")

And the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("rwrandles/washex-r")

Usage

Some possible implementations of the washex package include

library(washex)
library(tidyverse)

sponsors_2007 <- getSponsors("2007-08")
sponsors_2007 %>% 
  group_by(District) %>%
  summarize(prop_repub = round(mean(Party == "R"),3))

head(getCommittees("2007-08")[,"Name"])

head(getStatusChanges("2007-08", "1001") %>%
  select("HistoryLine", "ActionDate"))

ag_bills <- getRCWBills("2007-08", c("15","16"))
getRollCalls.votes("2007-08", ag_bills$BillNumber) %>% 
  filter(str_detect("Final Passage", Motion)) %>%
  mutate(Party = sponsors_2007$Party[match(MemberId, sponsors_2007$Id)]) %>%
  group_by(BillId) %>%
  summarize(repub_support = sum(Vote == "Yea" & Party == "R") / sum(Party == "R"),
            dem_support = sum(Vote == "Yea" & Party == "D") / sum(Party == "D"))