SeqCalifornia

Sequence analysis of political trajectories over Californian data

• Copyright 2021-23 Noémie Févrat & Vincent Labatut

SeqCalifornia is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. For source availability and license information see licence.txt

• Lab site: http://lia.univ-avignon.fr/
• GitHub repo: https://github.com/CompNet/SeqCalifornia
• Contact: Noemie Fevrat [email protected], Vincent Labatut [email protected]

---

Description

This set of scripts takes advantage of data on California elected officials compiled from research previously carried out by Pr. Thad Kousser at the University of California, San Diego. The results concerning the re-election of Californian elected officials presented in Noémie Fevrat's PhD dissertation [F'24] are based on these scripts.

In addition, these scripts reproduce the experiments described in the paper published in issue 40 of Politique Américaine by Noémie Fevrat [F'23].

If you use these scripts or the data they produce, please cite reference [F'24]:

@PhdThesis{Fevrat2021,
  author           = {Févrat, Noémie},
  title            = {Le mandat de trop ? La réélection des parlementaires et des maires en France et les conditions de sa remise en cause},
  school           = {Université d'Avignon},
  year             = {2024},
  type             = {PhD Thesis},
  address          = {Avignon, FR},
  url              = {[tel-04550896](https://hal.science/tel-04550896)},
}

Data

The scripts are meant to be applied to a corpus of data on California State Legislative elected officials between 1980 and 2012, compiled by Pr.Thad Kousser. The data has been completed and updated, now covering the period 1980-2022. It is available within this GitHub repository.

Organization

Here are the folders composing the project:

• Folder data: state Legislative elected officials, legislature after legislature.
• Folder plots: plots generated by the scripts.
• Folder src : set of scripts.

Installation

1. Install the R language
2. Download this project from GitHub and unzip the archive.
3. Use the src/install.R script to install the required packages.

Use

In order to replicate the experiments from the article, perform the following operations:

1. Open the R console.
2. Set the current projet directory as the working directory, using setwd("my/path/to/the/project/SignedBenchmark").
3. Run the main script `src/main.R

Dependencies

• igraph package: used to build and handle graphs.
• readr package: read rectangular text data.
• dplyr package: data manipulation.
• TraMineR package: sequence analysis.
• GDAtools package: geometric data analysis.

References

• [F'23] Noémie Févrat. "The Effects of U.S State Legislative Term Limits on Political Representation and Professionalization". Politique Américaine, 2023, I (40), pp.51-80. ⟨hal-04160170⟩
• [F'24] Noémie Févrat. Le "mandat de trop" ? La réélection des parlementaires et des maires en France et les conditions de sa remise en cause. PHD Thesis, Avignon Université, 2024. ⟨tel-04550896⟩