briatte / seimas

Bill cosponsorship networks in the Lithuanian Parliament.

This repository contains code to build cosponsorship networks from bills passed in the Lithuanian Parliament.

• interactive demo
• static plots
• more countries

HOWTO

Replicate by running make.r in R.

The data.r script downloads information on bills and sponsors. All photos should download fine.

The build.r script then assembles the edge lists and plots the networks, with the help of a few routines coded into functions.r. Adjust the plot, gexf and mode parameters to skip the plots or to change the node placement algorithm.

DATA

Bills

• legislature – legislature years
• uids – bill unique identifier
• urls – bill URL
• date – date of introduction
• text – short title
• authors – first authors
• cosponsors – cosponsors

There is no strict separation between authors and cosponsors: when there are many authors, some of them are simply listed on a different page. The separation is technical, not formal.

Sponsors

The sponsors data have multiple entries for each sponsor (one per legislature in which the sponsor sat).

• legislature – legislature years
• url – profile URL
• photo – photo URL
• id – unique identifier, first letter of first name + family name
• name – full name (no duplicates)
• sex – gender (F/M), imputed from title ("narė/narys")
• born – year of birth (int)
• party – party affiliation, abbreviated
• constituency – sponsor constituency (many missing)
• mandates – semicolon-separated mandate years, used to compute the nyears seniority variable

Note – the Brazauskas/Paulauskas coalition lists are coded as Social-Liberals (socialliberalai).