vignettes/lawmakers.md

In titaniumtroop/aRlegislation: A Dataset of Arkansas Legislation from 2001-2019

Lawmakers

This vignette examines the structure of the lawmakers tibbles contained within the legislation dataset and displays the political makeup of the Arkansas Legislature over time as an example use case.

library(aRlegislation)
library(dplyr)
library(tidyr) # needed for nest/unnest operations
library(ggplot2)

For purposes of this dataset, the term “sponsor” refers to one or more lawmakers or committees that propose an enacted bill during a legislative session. This table contains demographic information about lawmakers, so it excludes committees – hence the name. Here’s what the structure of one of the lawmakers tibbles looks like:

head(legislation$lawmakers[[1]])
#> # A tibble: 6 x 11
#>   sponsor sponsor_full_na… chamber party committee seniority district occupation
#>   <chr>   <chr>            <chr>   <chr> <chr>     <chr>        <dbl> <chr>     
#> 1 Adams   Bob Adams        House   D     TASK FOR… 73              48 Grant Cou…
#> 2 Agee    Sarah Agee       House   R     ARKANSAS… 46               9 Cattle Pr…
#> 3 Allison Jerry Allison    House   D     PUBLIC T… 9               86 Owner, Al…
#> 4 Altes   Denny Altes      House   R     PUBLIC H… 66              14 Recycler …
#> 5 Argue   Jim Argue        Senate  D     ALC/JBC … 13              15 Foundatio…
#> 6 B. Joh… Bob Johnson      Senate  D     AGRICULT… 34              25 <NA>      
#> # … with 3 more variables: church <chr>, veteran <chr>, public_service <chr>

As an example, we can look at the political makeup of the lawmakers in each regular-session legislative chamber over time pretty easily:

# Use party-related colors
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 %>%
  filter(grepl("R", session)) %>% # regular sessions only
  unnest(lawmakers) %>%
  count(cycle, session, party, chamber) %>%
  ggplot(aes(y = n, x = cycle, color = party)) +
    geom_point(size = 2.5) +
    geom_line(size = 3) +
    facet_wrap(~ chamber) +
    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(
      x = "",
      y = "",
      title = "Political Makeup of the Arkansas Legislature"
    ) +
    theme(legend.position = "none")

This graph shows a very pronounced switch in the makeup of both chambers of the Arkansas legislature between 2009 and 2017.

titaniumtroop/aRlegislation documentation built on May 4, 2020, 3:24 a.m.