Awesome

This repository contains code to build cosponsorship networks from bills passed in the Estonian parliament.

HOWTO

Replicate by running make.r in R.

The data.r script downloads information on bills and sponsors. Information on sponsors from past legislatures are downloaded as single-page summaries, whereas sponsors from the current legislature have more detailed individual biographies.

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.

The networks are very sparse (0.01 < d < 0.02), basically because there are very few nominally cosponsored bills per legislature. It is much more common for bills to be introduced by the executive or by 1+ parliamentary committee than by 1+ nominal sponsors.

DATA

Bills

legislature -- legislature number (numeric)
session -- legislature id (text)
number -- legislature number
date -- date of introduction of the bill (dd.mm.yyyy)
title -- bill title
url -- bill URL
authors -- bill sponsors, using their full names
links -- bill sponsors, using their URLs (when available)
n_a -- number of sponsors (from full names)
n_l -- number of sponsors (from URLs)

Note -- given that only sponsors present in legislature 13 (the current one) have a URL, the sponsor information should be derived from their full names rather than from their URLs, except if one is working on legislature 13 alone.

Awesome

HOWTO

DATA

Bills

Sponsors