politicsR
Calculating Political System Metrics
A toolbox to facilitate the calculation of political system indicators for researchers.
This package offers a variety of basic indicators related to electoral systems, party systems, elections,
and parliamentary studies, as well as others. Main references are:
Loosemore and Hanby (1971)
politicsR
politicsR is an R package designed to help political science
researchers in calculating conventional party system and political
metrics. It offers a comprehensive set of functions for calculating a
wide range of indicators, including:
-
Party System Fractionalization Index as proposed by Douglas Rae (1968)
-
Effective Number of Political Parties by Laakso, M., & Taagepera, R. (1979)
-
Party Nationalization Index by Jones, M. P., & Mainwaring, S. (2003)
-
Rice Party Cohesion Index by Rice (1925); and many more.
Installation
You can install the development version of politicsR from
GitHub with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("silvadenisson/politicsR")
Basic usage
To get started with politicsR, load the package with:
library(politicsR)
#>
#> To cite politicsR in publications, use: citation('politicsR')
Then you can start calculating diffent metrics, such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Concentration Index (HH):
x <- c(0.1, 0.1, 0.3, 0.5)
hh(x)
#> [1] 0.36
Or the Effective Number of Political Parties (ENP):
enp(x)
#> [1] 2.777778
The politicsR package also contains a few datasets with electoral
results that can be used to test its functions. These datasets are
organized by the Constituency-Level Elections Archive
(CLEA) project and provide a rich
source of information for political analysis. With these datasets and
the functions provided by the package, users can easily calculate
political science metrics such as Douglas Rae’s Fractionalization Index:
data(spain)
barc2019 <- spain[spain$yr == 2019 & spain$cst_n == "Barcelona",]
fractionalization(barc2019$pvs1)
#> [1] 0.6828265