RObservations #28 Canada’s Political Leadership and Inflation (Another Kaggle Contribution)

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Introduction

In my last blog I shared a basic dataset listing the Prime Minister’s of Canada, the start and end of their terms and the political party they associated themselves with during their tenure. In this blog I share my second dataset contribution that compliments this- Canadian inflation rate data.

Note: This blog is based on my Kaggle notebook covering the topic. To get the relevant data from this blog check out my contributions: Canadian Prime Ministers and Canada Inflation Rates.

Loading and Combining the Data Together

The Canada Prime Ministers dataset is loaded in similar to how I did in my previous blog, however to have it in a format that will combine the data with the inflation data, I add a variable called Term Interval which combines the start and end dates of a Prime Minister’s tenure.

# Supress warnings for this
options(warn=-1)
library(tidyverse) # metapackage of all tidyverse packages
library(lubridate)

prime_ministers <- readr::read_csv('../input/canadian-prime-ministers/Canadian Prime Ministers Dataset.csv', show_col_types=FALSE) %>%
    # Format Dates Properly
    mutate(`Term Start` = anytime::anydate(`Term Start`),
         # For Justin Trudeau's Term We'll have it up to today ()
         `Term End` = ifelse(Name == "Justin Trudeau",lubridate::today(),anytime::anydate(`Term End`)) %>% anytime::anydate(),
        # An interval of the start and end date of a prime minister
         `Term Interval` = lubridate::interval(`Term Start`,`Term End`))

tail(prime_ministers)
No.NamePolitical PartyTerm StartTerm EndTerm Interval
18Brian MulroneyProgressive Conservative1984-09-171993-06-241984-09-17 UTC–1993-06-24 UTC
19Kim CampbellProgressive Conservative1993-06-251993-11-031993-06-25 UTC–1993-11-03 UTC
20Jean ChrétienLiberal1993-11-042003-12-111993-11-04 UTC–2003-12-11 UTC
21Paul MartinLiberal2003-12-122006-02-052003-12-12 UTC–2006-02-05 UTC
22Stephen HarperConservative2006-02-062015-11-032006-02-06 UTC–2015-11-03 UTC
23Justin TrudeauLiberal2015-11-042022-04-062015-11-04 UTC–2022-04-06 UTC

To combine the Prime Ministers dataset together with the inflation data I use the mutate function and define a new field called political_party. It is with this I use the mapply() function (a multivariable version of lapply) and deal the details of this mapping. To deal with filling NA values, tidyr::fill(..., .direction="downup") is employed.

Its ugly, but it works.

inflation_data <- readr::read_csv('../input/canada-inflation-rates-source-bank-of-canada/CPI-INFLATION-sd-1993-01-01-ed-2022-01-01.csv',
                                 show_col_types = FALSE)%>% 
                    mutate(date=anytime::anydate(date),
                          political_party=mapply(function(x,y,z)  z[x %within% y], 
                               x=date, 
                               y = prime_ministers$`Term Interval`,
                               z=prime_ministers$`Political Party`) %>% 
                        lapply(function(x) ifelse(length(x)==0, NA,x)) %>% 
                        unlist() 
) %>% 
  tidyr::fill( political_party,.direction="downup")
                           
head(inflation_data)
dateINDINF_CPI_MINDINF_LOWTARGETINDINF_UPPTARGETpolitical_party
1993-01-012.01.9722233.972223Liberal
1993-02-012.41.9444453.944445Liberal
1993-03-011.91.9166673.916667Liberal
1993-04-011.81.8888903.888889Liberal
1993-05-011.91.8611123.861111Liberal
1993-06-011.71.8333343.833333Liberal

Now for making the visual. With the ggthemes package and the theme_fivethirtyeight() geom, the visual looks quite nice and informative. From the visual below its possible to see that there might be a relationship, but it is too noisy to look at in its present form.

Since this analysis is just to compliment the data, a formal analysis has been not conducted. Some of the things to consider would be:

  1. Looking at the time series decomposition of the data to account for seasonality and look at the trend component.

  2. Test to see if inflation between conservative and liberal leadership is the same or not.

  3. After talking a little bit on the R discord server it was suggested to try to lag inflation by two years to account for a given leadership to undo or alter the policy of its predecessor.

If you looked into any of these questions let me know and I would love to check out and share the work as well.

I hope you enjoy this dataset. Be sure to upvote and share around!

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