This post is a little more esoteric than most, but I found myself needing to solve this problem, so I’m just passing the solution on to you. The plot above shows the distribution of DW-NOMINATE scores for the 18th Congress, with party indicated ... [Read more...]

In a recent post, I illustrated how to add a background geom to your ggplot. While that code worked, and the plot looked fine, it was pointed out to me that I was missing an important aspect of plot layering with ggplot2. Namely, it is not, as I previ... [Read more...]

I really enjoy using the DW-NOMINATE data for examples, as I do here. Sometimes it’s useful to indicate regions in the background of a plot — perhaps two-dimensional regions of interest, perhaps one-dimensional periods in time. It’s... [Read more...]

This Gist has a couple of things going on, I’ll just list them: It downloads the entire history of U.S. House DW-NOMINATE scores from voteview.com It evaluates aggregate statistics, with members grouped by party and congress, with easy weighted ... [Read more...]