Final Data Science Project: legislatoR+

Link to Shiny App

Link to Project Report

---

Project Members

• Benedikt Ströbl (Twitter, LinkedIn)
• Lukas Warode (Website, Twitter, LinkedIn)

Project Description

legislatoR+ is a dashboard project from Benedikt Ströbl and Lukas Warode with the goal to provide an accessible and useful visual tool for the existing legislatoR R package. legislatoR itself is based on The Comparative Legislators Database (Göbel and Munzert, 2021), a far-reaching political science data project that provides both comprehensive information for over 45,000 politicians from ten countries while also including linking possibilities to other research databases within the political science context.

legislatoR+ provides (in the preliminary version) several options of visual communication, including a constituency-based map and 2 descriptive plots. All graphical elements are based on Shiny's reactive infrastructure.

For reasons of accessibility and simplicity that comes with avoiding large data handling issues -- the scope of available data differs across the ten countries -- the preliminary version for the final project is based on a German sample starting with the 15th legislative period (Bundestagswahl 2002).

Statement of Contribution

Most of the project work took place in a very collaborative dynamic. In the preliminary stages, there was a lively exchange between both project members, with most of the ideas and theoretical approaches of the project having been implicitly worked on jointly.

In the advanced and practical stages, a certain division of labor crystallized. However, a large part of the project was approached in a co-working place, which is why many practical projects and especially problems were evaluated directly together.

In detail, the division of work was as follows:

• Benedikt Ströbl mainly handled the different map data formats and took care of the configuration of the HTML template. He also created the visual leaflet map base and interactivity with special emphasis on the constituencies and the implied complex data matching and wrangling tasks inside of the Shiny backend context.

• Lukas Warode was mainly involved in setting up the Shiny backend and did a lot of the practical data manipulation inside and outside the Shiny reactivity context. He also worked on the ggplot2 foundation of the two descriptive statistics and configured the visual and written outline of the R Markdown report.

---

License

The material in this repository is made available under the MIT license.