Christopher DeSante
R & DATA VISUALIZATION
Though I began my Ph.D. as a political theorist, I have come to enjoy working with R and data visualization. Now, I am certainly not an expert at graphing, but I do know that making basic figures in R can be both time consuming and frustrating. A short handbook for using ggplot, an excellent graphics package in R, is available here. Obviously, the best source for tutorials on ggplot is professor Wickham's own site.
The graphic, left, comes from a paper I've written on how Americans evaluate applicants for welfare. The paper shows that blacks and whites are rewarded differently for hard work and punished differently for laziness (all else equal). What this graphic in particular illustrates is the usefulness of the racial resentment measure, as "hard working whites" are the only target to not suffer from higher than average levels of racial resentment.
The second graphic, also left, comes from my dissertation. My project focuses on universal values as the foundations of partisanship. Using the Schwartz value battery I have plotted Democrats and Republicans in two dimensional space coloring the Republicans red and Democrats blue with the size of the point corresponding to the strength of an individual's partisanship. As we can see, partisans are clearly polarizing on these oppositional values.
