Congressional Social Networks in R

Using data from ProPublica's Bulk Data on Bills and an API key, these scripts generate and visualize cosponsor relationships between legislators.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• httr
• jsonlite
• igraph
• ggraph

Usage

Downloads

Clone this repo with

git clone https://github.com/blakemoya/congressional_networks

Use this link to download a zip file containing data on all the bills introduced by a Congress in some particular year. The file will be named after that Congress's number (i.e. the 115th Congress will give you 115.zip) Extract the file/files of interest into the congressional_networks directory.

Configuration

Use this link to request an API key. Save the key emailed to you in a .txt file called api_key.txt followed by an empty line (i.e. copy and paste in the key, then press enter and save). Copy this file into the congressional_networks directory.

Then, in line 5 of both gen_graphfiles.R and gen_plots.R set the variable congress to the congress you are interested in. For instance, if I downloaded and extracted 115.zip:

congress = 115

Once this is done, you can run gen_graphfiles.R (in RStudio, Ctrl + A, Ctrl + Enter) and then gen_plots.R. gen_plots.R takes a lot of time to produce house graphs, but the results are well worth it.

Results

The 116th House

The 116th Senate