Introduction In a previous post, I looked at how House Representatives referred to the 45th US President on Twitter during the 116th Congress. Variation was super interesting, and demonstrated (in part) that party affiliation influenced how House members referred to 45. Namely, Republicans more frequently used referring expressions that highlighted the ...

Intro A quick/simple post: using the PL94171 package to access Census 2020 counts. Census data won’t be API-accessible until ~late September; these data are available, however, for redistricting purposes – albeit in a funky format. The PL94171 package can be used to download and re-structure these files for super convenient ...

Statewide historical election data New Mexico State Senate Building an ensemble Partition ensemble & historical votes Results Summary References The last in a series of notes on gerrymandering & R. Here, an R-based appendix - of sorts - for a collection of computational redistricting methods (Ben Fifield et al. 2020; Benjamin Fifield, Higgins, ...

State legislative election results Summarizing election results Historical vote distributions Seats-votes curves Resources Some notes on mean-median & partisan bias scores, and building seats-votes curves using lower house state legislative election results in the USA from 1971-2018. Also a place to organize some different non-geographical approaches to identifying partisan gerrymandering – eg – ...

A brief note on gerrymandering, and cracking and packing (see Warrington 2018 for a proper discussion). Specifically, a simple simulation demonstrating how gross partisan asymmetries in state legislatures can be crafted from perfectly symmetrical statewide populations. Per function below, we designate individuals in a population of N voters as either Republican ...

Introduction Tweet-set Media bias data set Resolving shortened URLs Shared news media sources Media bias & tSNE Resources Introduction This post provides a brief description of methods for quantifying political bias of online news media based on the media-sharing habits of US lawmakers on Twitter. I have discussed this set of ...

Intro NM State Senate Democrats Open-States Data DW-NOMINATE procedure Loss of the center Summary Intro So, a bit of a dust-up in the State Senate primaries in New Mexico over the summer. Progressives took aim at five Democratic members of a conservative coalition that has controlled the chamber since 2009. This ...

Introduction A bit of a depot for things-/methods- mapping with R & ggplot, in the context of visualizing historical roll calls from the US House of Representatives. Roll call data accessed via VoteView and the RVoteview package; shapefiles for historical US Congressional Districts downloaded from the Political Science Dept @ UCLA. ...

Breifly VoteView & DW-NOMINATE Longest-serving members of the US House Longest-serving members & political ideology Longest-serving members & election margins Margins & ideology: the example of Frank Pallone, Jr. (NJ-06) A re-election model – logistic regression Thoughts Breifly In this post, we take a couple of different historical perspectives on the US House of Representatives, ...

Breifly VoteView & DW-NOMINATE Longest-serving members of the US House Longest-serving members & political ideology Longest-serving members & election margins Margins & ideology: the example of Frank Pallone, Jr. (NJ-06) A re-election model – logistic regression Thoughts Breifly In this post, we take a couple of different historical perspectives on the US House of Representatives, ...

Introduction Corpus & model Evaluation & analogy Experimental set-up Results: model parameters Results: analogy categories Visualizing vector offsets Summary & caveats References Introduction This post walks through corpus-based methods for evaluating the efficacy of vector space models in capturing semantic relations. Here we consider the standard evaluation tool for VSMs: the offset method ...

American generations Monthly US population estimates American population by generation American generations by age & race White America on the wane American generations in (apparent) time & space Summary American generations A quick look at the composition of American generations. Per Pew Research definitions & US Census data. In the process, a static ...

A COVID19 lexicon Congressional Twitter Corpus (2020) text2vec framework for NLP :: Tokens & tokenizers Multi-word expressions & controlled vocabularies DTMs & prevalence of COVID19-related concepts GloVe model & COVID19 semantic space Networks & lexical co-occurrence Summary A SHORT COURSE IN COMPUTATIONAL-CORPUS LINGUISTICS – using the R library text2vec – with a focus on working with (...

Brief introduction Twitter details 2019 NOVEL CORONAVIRUS & lexical variation Patterns of variation over time Summary Brief introduction So, lots of linguistic variation happening in real time. coronavirus, covid19, pandemic, and more recently (the?) coronavirus pandemic. For sure, these expressions are not proper synonyms – each refer to different “aspects” of the virus. ...

Briefly Front-line House Democrats Ideologies in the 116th Focusing on Democrats Summary Briefly A quick look at the voting behavior of the 30 House Democrats that represent congressional districts carried by Trump in 2016 – relative to other House members. Using Rvoteview. For a more in-depth account of the characteristics of front-line House ...