Community projects related to political science and gerrymandering

[sidgrid]

Hi all, I am new to this forum and interested in learning about community projects that use R for studying gerrymandering and similar topics in political science. I would love to contribute to a project and am looking for guidance and/or pointers.

Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks

[technocrat]

The Alarm Project has a variety of R-based approaches to redistricting. Most of redistricting for the 2020 census became effective in the 2022 elections, and I don't expect to see much new until the runup to the 2032 elections. Most of the interest will probably be directed to the effects of current events over the rest of the decade on the 2024, 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections based on reported 2020 decennial Census data and the ASC updates to follow.

The {vote} package provides tools for analyzing rank choice and other alternative voting systems.

Use "political science" as a search term at [rseek.org]("political science") for various packages related to political science.

I don't find many R related repositories for voting or for US-related politics.

There was a Democratic Party oriented get-out-the-vote project in the past few elections that seemed to cast a wide net, but I didn't find opportunities to become involved beyond contributing money.

Compared to biometrics, which has a very large and diverse academic community invested in R and even econometrics, my sense is that the political science involvement in R is relatively minor.

[fcas80]

Hi Sidgrid,

You might look into whether there is a data analysis group within your local political party. I did, and they have a lot of demographic voter data. I attempted to analyze people who are registered as independents and whether there were categories likely to lean towards my party. I also found Cooperative Election Study https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/) which has a lot of interesting voting data, although the data gets thin locally.