Awesome

This repository contains code to build cosponsorship networks from bills passed in the Bulgarian 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 altogether. 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, as years range
• uid -- bill URL, shortened to numeric id
• ref -- another unique identifier
• date -- date of introduction of the bill (yyyy-mm-dd)
• session -- parliamentary session number (subcomponent of legislature), in Bulgarian
• title -- title, in Bulgarian
• authors -- bill sponsors as semicolon-separated numeric ids
• committee -- the committee(s) through which the bill has gone

Government bills are identified as "GOV" in the authors variable. Because no authors are provided for the bills of legislature 39 (2001-2005), the legislature is discarded by the network building routine.

Sponsors

The sponsors data has one row per legislature in which the sponsor sat, starting with legislature 40 (2005-2009).

• legislature -- legislature number
• name -- full name, in English (with some additions from Wikipedia)
• born -- year of birth
• born_bg -- whether born in Bulgaria (0/1)
• mandates -- legislatures in which the sponsor sat before the current one
• party -- political party, abbreviated
• job -- sponsor occupation
• constituency -- constituency, as the string to its Wikipedia English entry
• url -- URL, shortened to its numeric uid
• sex -- gender (F/M), imputed from first and family names ("-ev" and "-ov" for males, "-va" for females)
• photo -- photo, as its local filename