Using plotly to visualize political science data

Introduction

First I load the needed libraries:

library(dplyr)

## 
## Attaching package: 'dplyr'

## The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
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##     filter, lag

## The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
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##     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

library(tidyr)
library(plotly)

## Warning: package 'plotly' was built under R version 3.3.2

## Loading required package: ggplot2

## Warning: package 'ggplot2' was built under R version 3.3.2

## 
## Attaching package: 'plotly'

## The following object is masked from 'package:ggplot2':
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##     last_plot

## The following object is masked from 'package:stats':
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##     filter

## The following object is masked from 'package:graphics':
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##     layout

Next I load the data that contains information about the party and ideological composition of state legislatures, and state level GDP. I collpase the data by state and by year in order to create some interesting plotly graphs.

stleg_gdp <- read.csv("stleg_gdp.csv")
stleg_gdp_year <- group_by(stleg_gdp, year)
stleg_gdp_year <- summarize(stleg_gdp_year, housemean=mean(hou_chamber, na.rm=TRUE),
                            senmean=mean(sen_chamber, na.rm=TRUE), 
                            gdpmean=mean(GDPtotal, na.rm=TRUE),
                            pcmean=mean(GDPpc, na.rm=TRUE), 
                            percentmean=mean(private_percent, na.rm=TRUE))
stleg_gdp_state <- group_by(stleg_gdp, statename)
stleg_gdp_state <- summarize(stleg_gdp_state, housemean=mean(hou_chamber, na.rm=TRUE),
                            senmean=mean(sen_chamber, na.rm=TRUE), 
                            gdpmean=mean(GDPtotal, na.rm=TRUE),
                            pcmean=mean(GDPpc, na.rm=TRUE), 
                            percentmean=mean(private_percent, na.rm=TRUE))
vadata <- filter(stleg_gdp, st=="VA")
newdata <- filter(stleg_gdp, st=="VA"|st=="NC"|st=="MD"|st=="PA")
stleg_gdp2 <- stleg_gdp
stleg_gdp2$year <- as.numeric(as.character(stleg_gdp2$year))

Graphics from plotly

Scatterplots

Basic scatterplot:

plot_ly(stleg_gdp_state, x = ~pcmean, y = ~housemean, type = "scatter")

## No scatter mode specifed:
##   Setting the mode to markers
##   Read more about this attribute -> https://plot.ly/r/reference/#scatter-mode

## Warning: Ignoring 1 observations

Scatterplot with color variant:

plot_ly(stleg_gdp_state, x = ~pcmean, y = ~housemean, type = "scatter", color = ~percentmean)

## No scatter mode specifed:
##   Setting the mode to markers
##   Read more about this attribute -> https://plot.ly/r/reference/#scatter-mode

## Warning: Ignoring 1 observations

3D Scatterplot

plot_ly(stleg_gdp2, x = ~year, y = ~GDPpc, z = ~hou_chamber,
        type = "scatter3d", color = ~private_percent)

## No scatter3d mode specifed:
##   Setting the mode to markers
##   Read more about this attribute -> https://plot.ly/r/reference/#scatter-mode

## Warning: Ignoring 69 observations

Time series line plots

plot_ly(vadata, x = ~year, y = ~hou_chamber, type = "scatter", mode = "lines")

plot_ly(newdata, x = ~year, y = ~hou_chamber, color = ~st, type = "scatter", mode = "lines")

## Warning in RColorBrewer::brewer.pal(N, "Set2"): n too large, allowed maximum for palette Set2 is 8
## Returning the palette you asked for with that many colors