I recently created a few datasets to facilitate analyzing the interaction between demographics and political party affiliations of US Congressional Districts. My goal was to create this graph:

I added this data to Choroplethr and pushed the new version to CRAN. This post walks you through using these datasets, the analysis I did, and the nuances behind the data.

Getting Started

The first step is to download the latest version of Choroplethr. Type the following at the R console:

install.packages("choroplethr")
library(choroplethr) 
packageVersion("choroplethr") 
# [1] ‘3.7.0’

This new version is 3.7.0, and your console should output “[1] ‘3.7.0’”

Technical Note

This analysis is limited to the 435 Voting Members of the House of Representatives who were elected to the 116th Congress in 2018. All demographic data is from the 2018 5-year American Community Survey (ACS).

New Data

?congress116.regions

Each time I start working with a new geography I like to create a data structure with a naming convention of .regions. These data structures always have a column named region which contains the “official” name of that region, and other columns that contain metadata about that region:

data(congress116.regions)
head(congress116.regions, n=10)
   region state.name state.fips district.number
1    0101    alabama         01              01
2    0102    alabama         01              02
3    0103    alabama         01              03
4    0104    alabama         01              04
5    0105    alabama         01              05
6    0106    alabama         01              06
7    0107    alabama         01              07
8    0200     alaska         02              00
9    0401    arizona         04              01
10   0402    arizona         04              02

Here region is a 4-character number (i.e. there is always a leading 0). We also have the name of the District’s State, its FIPS code and District Number.

As a rule of thumb, the numbering of Districts starts at “01”. The exception to this is when a state has only one Voting Member (such as Alaska, shown above). Then the District Number is “00”.

?df_congress116_demographics

I also added a data.frame that contains a handful of demographic statistics about each Congressional District. The naming convention for these data structures in Choroplethr is df__demographics. So here the structure’s name is ?df_congress116_demographics. The data comes from the 2018 5-year ACS.

data(df_congress116_demographics)
head(df_congress116_demographics)
  region total_population percent_white percent_black percent_asian percent_hispanic per_capita_income median_rent median_age
1   0101           706503            65            27             1                3             26318         637       39.6
2   0102           680575            62            31             1                4             25511         566       38.5
3   0103           706705            68            25             2                3             25172         524       38.4
4   0104           683391            84             7             1                6             23865         430       40.8
5   0105           714145            73            17             2                5             30809         565       39.7
6   0106           703715            76            15             2                5             34527         766       39.0

Note: this data comes from a new function I wrote called ?get_congressional_district_demographics. If you want to get the same data from other years or surveys, use that function.

?df_congress116_party

The purpose of this analysis was not just to look at demographic statistics, but to see the interaction between demographics and party affiliation. I scraped political party data on the members of the 116th Congress from Wikipedia and stored it in the data.frame ?df_congress116_party:

data(df_congress116_party)
head(df_congress116_party)
  region      party state.name district.number          member
1   0101 Republican    alabama              01   Bradley Byrne
2   0102 Republican    alabama              02     Martha Roby
3   0103 Republican    alabama              03     Mike Rogers
4   0104 Republican    alabama              04 Robert Aderholt
5   0105 Republican    alabama              05       Mo Brooks
6   0106 Republican    alabama              06     Gary Palmer

Visualizing the Data

ggplot2 requires all your data to be in a single data.frame. So we start by merging ?df_congress_116_demographics with ?df_congress116_party:

df = merge(df_congress116_demographics, df_congress116_party)

The code to create the graph at the top of this post is actually quite complicated. I encapsulated it in the new function ?visualize_df_by_race_ethnicity_party:

library(ggplot2)

visualize_df_by_race_ethnicity_party(df) +
    ggtitle("Race and Ethnicity of US Congressional Districts by Party\n116th Congress, 2018 5-year ACS")

We still need to set the title manually, because the function has no way to know the geography or year of the data.

Explanation

When I show the above chart to my friends who have studied Data Visualization they say “Wow – that’s pretty dramatic!” However, my friends who have not studied Data Visualization are confused by it. I would like this analysis to be understood by everyone, so I’ll take a moment to explain the chart.

The chart shows a series of Box Plots. A  Box Plot helps you understand how numbers are distriburted.

• The “box” shows the 25th to 75th percentiles.
• The horizontal line in the middle of the box shows the median value.
• The vertical line shows the minimum and maximum values.
• The circles are statistical outliers.

Example

Now that you know what a Box Plot is, we can walk through a specific example of how it helps us understand this data.

Each Congressional District has some percentage of residents who are White. That number must be between 0 (no White residents) and 100 (all residents are White). This chart divides all Congressional Districts into two groups based on the Political Party that each District voted for. Then it creates a box plot to visualize the percent of residents in each group that are White.

ggplot(df, aes(party, percent_white)) + 
    geom_boxplot(aes(fill = party)) + 
    scale_fill_manual(values = c("blue", "red")) +
    ggtitle("Percent White US Congressional Districts by Party\n116th Congress, 2018 5-year ACS")

The result here is quite dramatic. For Democratic Districts, the median value was 52% White. But for Republican Districts, the median value was 76% White. The median value for Republican Districts was higher than the 75th percentile for Democratic Districts. This Box Plot alone demonstrates that in the 116th Congress, the Democratic and Republican Districts had very different demographics. The other plots simply reinforce that point.

How You Can Help

I often hear from Choroplethr users who love the project and want to help it succeed. There are three ways you can help.

Funding

The best way to help Choroplethr grow remains with funding. I estimate that it will take about a month to move all the Choroplethr maps from the old “Fortified Data Frame” format to Simple Features. If you know of an organization that can fund that work, then please contact me.

Review my Work

Another way you can help is by reviewing my work. Choroplethr is currently a side project, which means that (a) I don’t have any QA staff double checking my work and (b) I don’t have any clients double checking my work. The worst case scenario is that my work contains an error, and that the error impacts someone’s analysis.

There are two things in this release that I would like reviewed:

• The code for getting the Congresssional District party affiliations (i.e. generating ?df_congress116_party), which can be found here. As you will see, I seem to have stumbled upon a bug in how RVest, R and/or RStudio handle   when scraped from Wikipedia. I detail the issue in the code, as well as my workaround.
• The code for getting the demographic statistics for the Congressional Districts, which can be found here. There seems to (arguably) be a bug in either TidyCensus or the data the Census API returns when you request demographic on Congressional Districts. I detail the issue in the code, as well as my workaround.

Redistricting Experts

?get_congressional_district_demographics currently returns eight demographic statistics for each District. These are the same eight variables that I chose, almost at random, five years ago when I started working on Choroplethr.

I would like to hear from Redistricting experts on the tables that they use in their work. I think it would be valuable to have Choroplethr grow into an open source tool that allows people to explore Redistricting. But to do that, I need to talk to subject matter experts. If you can help with this, then please contact me.

The post Exploring the Demographics of US Congressional Districts in R appeared first on AriLamstein.com.