United Nations Vote Data

Description

This data frame contains votes from the first three sessions of the United Nations. The same data can also be downloaded as a CSV file from www.voteview.com. The object of this data set is to provide an example of how one might use the W-NOMINATE package on a set of roll call votes not already stored in ORD format.

Usage

data(UN)

Value

This data frame contains votes from the first three sessions of the United Nations. The first column are country names, while the second column indicates membership in the former Warsaw Pact (used as a 'party' variable). Yeas are coded 1, 2, and 3, nays are coded 4, 5, and 6, missing votes are coded 7, 8, and 9, and not being in the General Assembly is coded as a 0.

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

Source

Keith Poole. 2005. UN Vote Data. https://legacy.voteview.com/.

See Also

'wnominate'.

Examples

#The same data set can be obtained from downloading the UN.csv
#file from www.voteview.com and reading it as follows:
#UN<-read.csv("C:/UN.csv",header=FALSE,strip.white=TRUE)

data(UN)
UN<-as.matrix(UN)
UN[1:5,1:6]

UNnames<-UN[,1]
legData<-matrix(UN[,2],length(UN[,2]),1)
colnames(legData)<-"party"
UN<-UN[,-c(1,2)]

rc <- rollcall(UN, yea=c(1,2,3), nay=c(4,5,6),
missing=c(7,8,9),notInLegis=0, legis.names=UNnames,
legis.data=legData,
desc="UN Votes",
source="www.voteview.com")

# Not run
#result<-wnominate(rc,polarity=c(1,1))
#plot(result)
#summary(result)

Test Data Generator for W-NOMINATE

Description

generateTestData is the function that generates a rollcall object used to test wnominate. The description of the result below is copied from the documentation of package pscl, written by Simon Jackman.

Usage

generateTestData(legislators=20, rcVotes=100,
            yea=matrix(runif(rcVotes,min=-0.2,max=0.7),nrow=rcVotes),
            nay=matrix(runif(rcVotes,min=-0.7,max=0.2),nrow=rcVotes),
            ideal=matrix(rnorm(legislators),nrow=legislators),
            Beta=15, dimweight=0.5,normal=1, seed = NULL, utility='nominate')

Arguments

Value

An object of class rollcall

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

See Also

'wnominate', 'nomprob'.

Examples

    dat<-generateTestData()
    result<-wnominate(dat,polarity=c(1,2))
    summary(result)
    plot(result)

NOMINATE Probability Matrix Generator

Description

nomprob takes estimates from the W-NOMINATE model and returns a matrix of yea choice probabilities. It is used to generate a test rollcall object using generateTestData.

Usage

nomprob(yea, nay, ideal, Beta, dimweight, normal=1)                       

Arguments

For items below, m is the number of roll calls, n the number of legislators, and d the number of dimensions.

Value

An n x m matrix of probabilities giving the probability of yea for each of n legislators on each of m votes

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

See Also

'generateTestData' and 'wnominate'.

Examples

    yp <- matrix(rep(0,10),nrow=10)
    np <- matrix(rep(0.1,10),nrow=10)
    ideal <- matrix(rep(0,10),nrow=10)
    nomprob(yp,np,ideal,15,0.5)    #a matrix of yea probabilities

W-NOMINATE Cutting Line Angles Plot

Description

plot.angles reads a W-NOMINATE object and plots a histogram of the angles of the cutlines for two dimensions. plot.angles does not work for one-dimensional W-NOMINATE objects.

Usage

## S3 method for class 'angles'
plot(x, main.title="Cutting Line Angles",
        x.title="Angle in Degrees", y.title="Count",
        dims=c(1,2), ...)

Arguments

Value

A cutting line angle plot.

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

See Also

'wnominate', 'plot.coords', 'plot.scree', 'plot.cutlines', 'plot.nomObject'

Examples

    #This data file is the same as that obtained using:
    #data(sen90)
    #sen90wnom<-wnominate(sen90,polarity=c(2,5))
    data(sen90wnom)

    summary(sen90wnom)
    plot.angles(sen90wnom)
    plot(sen90wnom)

W-NOMINATE Coordinate Plot

Description

plot.coords reads a W-NOMINATE object in 2 user-specified dimensions and plots the coordinates of each member, applying separate colors and shapes to each party by default. A unit circle is included to emphasize the constraints on the W-NOMINATE coordinates, and options to select non-party attributes of legislators are included. For a 1D W-WNOMINATE object, W-NOMINATE scores are plotted against their ranks.

Usage

## S3 method for class 'coords'
plot(x, main.title="W-NOMINATE Coordinates",
    d1.title="First Dimension", d2.title="Second Dimension", dims=c(1,2),
    plotBy="party", color=TRUE, shape=TRUE, cutline=NULL, Legend=TRUE,
    legend.x=0.8, legend.y=1, ...)            

Arguments

Value

A coordinate plot.

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

See Also

'wnominate', 'plot.scree', 'plot.cutlines', 'plot.angles', 'plot.nomObject'

Examples

    #This data file is the same as that obtained using:
    #data(sen90)
    #sen90wnom<-wnominate(sen90,polarity=c(2,5))
    data(sen90wnom)

    summary(sen90wnom)
    plot.coords(sen90wnom)
    plot(sen90wnom)

W-NOMINATE Cutline Plot

Description

plot.cutlines reads a W-NOMINATE object and plots the cutting line of a specified proportion of all votes along two user-specified dimensions. The default is to plot 50 cutting lines. This is also known as a Coombs mesh. A unit circle is included to emphasize the constraints on the W-NOMINATE coordinates. Only cutlines that are constrained to have midpoints lying in a unit circle are included. plot.cutlines does not work for 1D W-NOMINATE objects.

Usage

         
## S3 method for class 'cutlines'
plot(x, main.title="Cutting Lines",
        d1.title="First Dimension", d2.title="Second Dimension",
        lines=50,dims=c(1,2),lwd=2, ...)

Arguments

Value

A Coombs mesh.

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

See Also

'wnominate', 'plot.coords', 'plot.scree', 'plot.angles', 'plot.nomObject'

Examples

    #This data file is the same as that obtained using:
    #data(sen90)
    #sen90wnom<-wnominate(sen90,polarity=c(2,5))
    data(sen90wnom)

    summary(sen90wnom)
    plot.cutlines(sen90wnom)
    plot(sen90wnom)

W-NOMINATE Summary Plot

Description

plot.nomObject reads a W-NOMINATE object in two user-specified dimensions and plots the coordinates, cutting lines, a Coombs mesh, and a Skree plot. For 1-dimensional W-NOMINATE objects, it plots the coordinates against the ranks along with a Skree plot.

Usage

## S3 method for class 'nomObject'
plot(x, dims=c(1,2), ...)              

Arguments

Value

A summary plot of a wnominate object.

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

See Also

'wnominate', 'plot.coords', 'plot.scree', 'plot.angles', 'plot.cutlines', 'plot.nomObject'

Examples

    #This data file is the same as that obtained using:
    #data(sen90)
    #sen90wnom<-wnominate(sen90,polarity=c(2,5))
    data(sen90wnom)

    summary(sen90wnom)
    plot(sen90wnom)

W-NOMINATE Scree Plot

Description

plot.scree is the function that takes a W-NOMINATE object and plots a Scree plot. Scree plots show the dimensionality of the voting by showing the sizes of the eigenvalues.

Usage

## S3 method for class 'scree'
plot(x, main.title="Scree Plot", x.title="Dimension",
        y.title="Eigenvalue", ...)

Arguments

Value

A Scree plot, showing the first 20 eigenvalues.

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

See Also

'wnominate', 'plot.coords', 'plot.cutlines', 'plot.angles', 'plot.nomObject'

Examples

    #This data file is the same as that obtained using:
    #data(sen90)
    #sen90wnom<-wnominate(sen90,polarity=c(2,5))
    data(sen90wnom)

    summary(sen90wnom)
    plot.scree(sen90wnom)
    plot(sen90wnom)

Qudaratic Normal Probability Matrix Generator

Description

qnprob takes estimates from the Quadratic Normal model and returns a matrix of yeah choice probabilities. It is used to generate a test rollcall object using generateTestData. The function is set up to take identical arguments to nomprob, which explains why many of the arguments do not do anything.

Usage

qnprob(yea,nay,ideal,Beta,dimweight,normal=1)                      

Arguments

For items below, m is the number of roll calls, n the number of legislators, and d the number of dimensions.

Value

An n x m matrix of probabilities giving the probability of yea for each of n legislators on each of m votes

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

See Also

'generateTestData' and 'wnominate'.

Examples

    yp <- matrix(rep(0,10),nrow=10)
    np <- matrix(rep(0.1,10),nrow=10)
    ideal <- matrix(rep(0,10),nrow=10)
    qnprob(yp,np,ideal,15,0.5)    #a matrix of yea probabilities

90th U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote Matrix

Description

This dataframe contains a matrix of votes cast by U.S. Senators in the 90th Congress. The data are formatted consistent with the rollcall object format in Simon Jackman's pscl package.

Usage

data(sen90)

Value

The dataframe contains roll call data for all Senators in the 90th Senate. The data is formatted as a rollcall object with the following elements.

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

Source

Keith Poole. 2005. 90th Senate Roll Call Vote Data. https://www.voteview.com/.

See Also

'wnominate'.

Examples

    #This data file is the same as reading file using:
    #sen90 <- readKH("ftp://voteview.com/sen90kh.ord")
    #All ORD files can be found on www.voteview.com
    data(sen90)
    
    summary(sen90)
    #sen90wnom <- wnominate(sen90,polarity=c(2,5))
    #'sen90wnom' is the same nomObject as found in 
    data(sen90wnom)
    summary(sen90wnom)
    plot(sen90wnom)

90th U.S. Senate Ideal Points

Description

This dataframe contains the estimated ideal points of the 90th U.S Senate using wnominate. Although it can easily be obtained from calling the example in wnominate, it is included here to facilitate illustration of the examples for the plot and summary functions.

Usage

data(sen90wnom)

Value

An object of class nomObject, which in this documentation is also referred to as a W-NOMINATE object.

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

Source

Keith Poole. 2005. 90th Senate Roll Call Vote Data. https://www.voteview.com/.

See Also

'wnominate'.

Examples

    #This data file is the same as reading file using:
    #sen90 <- readKH("ftp://voteview.com/sen90kh.ord")
    #All ORD files can be found on www.voteview.com
    data(sen90)
    
    summary(sen90)
    #sen90wnom <- wnominate(sen90,polarity=c(2,5))
    #'sen90wnom' is the same nomObject as found in 
    data(sen90wnom)
    summary(sen90wnom)
    plot(sen90wnom)

W-NOMINATE Summary

Description

summary.nomObject reads a W-NOMINATE object and prints a summary.

Usage

## S3 method for class 'nomObject'
summary(object,verbose=FALSE, ...)              

Arguments

Value

A summary of a wnominate object. Correct classification, APRE, and GMP are reported separately for each dimension.

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

See Also

'wnominate', 'plot.coords', 'plot.scree', 'plot.angles', 'plot.cutlines', 'plot.nomObject'

Examples

    #This data file is the same as that obtained using:
    #data(sen90)
    #sen90wnom<-wnominate(sen90,polarity=c(2,5))
    data(sen90wnom)
    summary(sen90wnom)
    plot(sen90wnom)

W-NOMINATE Roll Call Scaling

Description

wnominate is the function that takes a rollcall object and estimates Poole and Rosenthal W-NOMINATE scores with them.

Usage

wnominate(rcObject, ubeta=15, uweights=0.5, dims=2, minvotes=20,
        lop=0.025,trials=3, polarity, verbose=FALSE)                        

Arguments

Value

An object of class nomObject, which in this documentation is also referred to as a W-NOMINATE object.

Author(s)

Keith Poole ktpoole@uga.edu

Jeffrey Lewis jblewis@ucla.edu

James Lo lojames@usc.edu

Royce Carroll rcarroll@rice.edu

References

Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. 1997. 'Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting.' New York: Oxford University Press.

Jeffrey Lewis. https://voteview.com/

Keith Poole, Jeffrey Lewis, James Lo, and Royce Carroll. 2011. ‘Scaling Roll Call Votes with WNOMINATE in R.’ Journal of Statistical Software, 42(14), 1-21. https://www.jstatsoft.org/v42/i14/

See Also

'generateTestData','plot.nomObject','summary.nomObject'.

Examples

    #This data file is the same as reading file using:
    #sen90 <- readKH("ftp://voteview.com/sen90kh.ord")
    #All ORD files can be found on www.voteview.com
    data(sen90)
    
    summary(sen90)
    #sen90wnom <- wnominate(sen90,polarity=c(2,5))
    #'sen90wnom' is the same nomObject as found in 
    data(sen90wnom)
    summary(sen90wnom)
    plot(sen90wnom)