This vignette examines the structure of the acts
tibbles contained within the legislation
dataset and displays the partisanship of the Arkansas Legislature over time as an exmample use case.
knitr::opts_chunk$set( collapse = TRUE, comment = "#>" )
library(aRlegislation) library(dplyr) library(tidyr) # needed for nest/unnest operations library(ggplot2)
The acts
tibbles contain the text of laws passed during each cycle/session, along with a little bit of metadata about the acts:
head(legislation$acts[[1]])
The act text has been lightly processed such that it is still human-readable. A really short act provides an example:
`r legislation$acts[[1]]$text[[200]]`
The act titles, subtitles, and text are suitable for natural language processing analysis, although examples of such are beyond the scope of this introduction. The text above illustrates one caveat: for acts that are amended, both the deleted text and the new text appears in the corpus [e.g., the act referenced above increases the dollar threshold from ~~ten thousand dollars ($10,000)~~ to twenty thousand dollars ($20,000)].
The metadata includes a calculated partisan value based on the political party of the bill sponsors, as follows:
The partisan value allows us to look at trends about bipartisanship over time, as follows:
party.colors <- c( "R" = "#990000", # dark red = Republicans "D" = "#668cff", # light blue = Democrats "G" = "#00cc00", # bright green = Green party "I" = "#444444", # dark grey = Independent "unk" = "#b3b300", # dark yellow = unknown "bipartisan" = "#8A2BE2", # purple "committee" = "#888888" # medium grey ) legislation %>% unnest(acts) %>% filter(partisan == "bipartisan") %>% count(cycle, partisan) %>% # counts number of parties sponsoring acts ggplot(aes(y = n, x = cycle, color = partisan)) + geom_point(size = 2.5) + geom_line(size = 3) + geom_smooth(method = "lm", color = "blue", se = T) + scale_x_continuous( breaks = seq(from = 2001, to = 2019, by = 4), minor_breaks = seq(from = 2001, to = 2019, by = 2) ) + scale_color_manual(values = party.colors) + labs( title = "Total Bipartisan Acts", x = "", y = "", caption = "" ) + theme( legend.text = element_text(size = 6), legend.position = "none" )
We can see here that the total number of bipartisan acts has been declining over time.
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