ciflikli / adavis

Visualising the US Liberal Quotient 1948-2015

adavis

A visual exploration of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) Voting Scores. The Shiny app is hosted at https://gokhan.shinyapps.io/adavis/

Alternatively, you can fork it on GitHub (preferred) or download a local copy:

shiny::runGitHub(username = "ciflikli", repo = "adavis")

Running the above code as it is will remove the files once the app is closed. You can pass an additional destdir = argument to save the contents locally in a more persistent manner. Make sure you have the required libraries installed; the list can be found at the beginning of global.R script in the app folder.

Description

• Utilizes about 36,000 US legislator voting scores originally collected by the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) foundation between 1947 and 2015
• "[Annual voting records] served as the standard measure of political liberalism. Combining 20 key votes on a wide range of social and economic issues, both domestic and international, the Liberal Quotient (LQ) provides a basic overall picture of an elected official's political position"
• Actual data compiled by Justin Briggs Blog post | .xlsx file
• Uses both nominal and adjusted ADA scores Procedure
• Data can be grouped by year, state, chamber, and party
• Data visualizations using statebins, plotly, ggExtra and base R

Features

State of the Union

• Charts a single Year > Chamber > Party combination on a first-level political (administrative) division map displaying either nominal or adjusted LQ score (averaged by state):

Change from Last Year

• Plots LQ score change from previous year (state-level). Hover info offers the precise amount in percentages:

Head-to-Head

• Allows the user to select two states and compare their voting scores in a specified timeframe. Works under the C/P constraint; i.e. it compares representatives from the same party/chamber:

Representatives

• Enables looking up specific representatives (3,371 in total) found in the dataset; offers descriptives on Year, Congress, District and plots their LQ scores, mean, and plus/minus one standard deviation:

Design

• Users can change viridis colour palettes (viridis, plasma, inferno, and magma) and direction (whether higher values are light or dark) throughout the app:

Legacy App

• The code for the legacy app (adamap) has been moved to the legacy folder. The Shiny app is still hosted at https://gokhan.shinyapps.io/adamap/