Calculating Political System Metrics.

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