The Split Senate

Code for reproducing the results in "The Split Senate" preprint.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

R (>= 3.6.1) or Python (>= 3.6) is necessary for analysis:

R can be downloaded here

The RStudio IDE can be downloaded here

Initial Setup

For R Analysis:

1. Clone github repo

2. Move to main scripts

cd CP_2021/R/scripts

3. Run gendata.R

rscript gendata.R

• This will install all necessary packages, create the annotated dataset for analysis, and set the working directory.

For Python Analysis: Replicates analysis in R using the SplitsPy package [1].

1. Clone github repo

2. Install Fisher's Exact Test in Python

pip install FisherExact

If an error occurs, may require pip install future or installation of gfortran (see here).

3. Move to main scripts

cd CP_2021/Python

Running Analysis

For R Code:

1. senateVotes.R

   • Code to generate splits graphs for the 116th Senate
   • Analysis of apparent 'coalitions' of Democratic Senators
   • Statistical analysis of vote contribution to coalition splits

2. splitDistCorr.R

   • Concordance and correlation of split weight distances and L1 input distances for the 116th Senate

3. senateOverTime.R

   • Analysis of agreement distributions ('center' distances) across Senates from the last 30 years

4. missingSenators.R

   • Creation of distance matrices for splits graphs of senators not present for all votes in the 116th Senate

5. exampleforFig1.R

   • Code to generate example splits graph in Figure 1

All scripts utilize functions from distFuncs.R

For Python Code:

1. run_voteAnalysis.py
   • Runs analysis analagous to senateVotes.R and senateOverTime.R
   • Generate circular split-system, phylogenetic outline of system, and NEXUS files for SplitsTree viewing
   • Analysis of apparent 'coalitions', statistical analysis of vote contributions to splits, and analysis of agreement distributions over time.

Authors

• Tara Chari

References

[1] Daniel H. Huson, Caner Bagci, Banu Cetinkaya and David Bryant. Phylogenetic context and the use of phylogenetic outlines. Manuscript in preparation (2021)