computeMargins: add information about voting outcomes to a rollcall object

Description

add summaries of each roll call vote to a rollcall object

Usage

computeMargins(object, dropList = NULL)

Arguments

object

an object of class rollcall

dropList

a list (or alist) listing voting decisions, legislators and/or votes to be dropped from the analysis; see d

Value

An object of class rollcall, with a component voteMargins that is a matrix with four columns:
Yeanumber of legislators voting Yea
Naynumber of legislators voting Nay
NAnumber of legislators not voting Nay
Minthe number of legislators voting on the losing side of the roll call

Details

The subseting implied by the dropList is first applied to the rollcall object, via dropRollCall. Then, for each remaining roll call vote, the number of legislators voting Yea, Nay, and not voting are computed, using the encoding information in the codes component of the rollcall object via the convertCodes function. The matrix of vote counts are added to the rollcall object as a component voteMargins.

Examples

Run this code

data(s109)
tmp <- computeMargins(s109)
dim(tmp$voteMargins)   ## 556 by 4

tmp <- computeMargins(s109,
                     dropList=list(codes="notInLegis",lop=0))
dim(tmp$voteMargins)   ## 477 by 4

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