R graph: plot

This R lesson is for the plot command. See here for other lessons.

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The start of this code is a bit complex. It's from R Commander, which is a way to use R through a graphical interface without having to write code.

library(foreign)

The library function with the foreign package is used to import data from SPSS, Stata, or some other software.

DWHouse <- read.dta("C:/house_polarization46_113v9.dta", convert.dates=TRUE, convert.factors=TRUE, missing.type=TRUE, convert.underscore=TRUE, warn.missing.labels=TRUE)

The above command reads data from Stata (.dta extension) and places the data into DWHouse. The house_polarization46_113v9.dta dataset is from Voteview polarization data, located here. [The v9 on the end of the dataset indicates that I saved the dataset as Stata version 9.]

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Here's the plot command:

plot(repmean1~year, type="p", xlim=c(1900,2012), ylim=c(-1,1), xlab="Year", ylab="Liberal - Conservative", pch=19, col="red", main="House", data=DWHouse)

Here are what the arguments mean: the tilde in repmean1~year plots repmean1 as a function of year, type="p" indicates to plot points, xlim=c(1900,2012) indicates the limits for the x-axis, ylim=c(-1,1) indicates the limits for the x-axis, xlab="Year" and ylab="Liberal - Conservative" respectively indicate labels for the x-axis and y-axis, pch=19 indicates to use the 19 plotting character [see here for a list of pchs], col="red" indicates the color for the pchs [see here for a list of colors], main="House" indicates the main title, and data=DWHouse indicates the data to plot.

Here's what the graph looks like so far:

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The repmean1 plotted above is the Republican Party mean for the first-dimension DW-Nominate scores among members of the House of Representatives. Let's add the Democrats. Instead of adding a new plot command, we just add points:

points(demmean1~year, type="p", pch=19, col="blue", data=DWHouse)

Now let's add some labels:

text(1960,0.4,labels="GOP mean", col="red")
text(1960,-0.4,labels="Dem mean", col="blue")

The first command adds text at the coordinate x=1960 and y =0.4; the text itself is "GOP mean," and the color of the text is red. I picked x=1960 and y =0.4 through trial and error to see where the text would look the nicest.

Here's the graph now:

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Notice that the x-axis is labeled in increments of 20 years (1900, 1920, 1940, ...). This can be changed as follows. First, add axes=F to the plot command to shut off axes; you could also write axes=FALSE); then add these axis lines below the plot command:

axis(1, at=seq(1900, 2020, 10))
axis(2, at=seq(-1, 1, 0.5))

The above lines tell R to plot axes at the indicated intervals. The first line arguments are: 1 tells R to plot an axis below [1=below, 2=left, 3=above, and 4=right], and the (1900, 2020, 10) sequence tells R to plot from 1900 to 2020 and place tick marks every 10 years. Here's the resulting graph:

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Notice that the x-axis and y-axis do not touch in the graph above. There's a few extra points plotted that I did not intend to plot: I meant to start the graph at 1900 so that the first point was 1901 (DW-Nominate scores are provided in the dataset every two years starting with 1879). To get the x-axis and y-axis to touch, add xaxs="i", yaxs="i" to the plot command. Let's also add box() to get a box around the graph, like we had in the first two graphs above.

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Here is the whole code for the plot above.