(iPoster) LegisTaiwan: Data Analysis and Applications with Taiwan Legislative Yuan API

• In Event: Poster Session: Legislative Studies & Politics in the American States
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Legislative Studies

Abstract

This research note introduces legisTaiwan, an R package that provides researchers with convenient and open access to Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan data through API integration and streamlined functions (Liao and Tang, 2024). In this research note, we document main categories of functions for interacting with the Legislative Yuan API: retrieval of interpellation and debate data, bill and budget information queries, and streamlined functions for further analysis. We provide a clear guideline for working with the Taiwan Legislative Yuan API using the legisTaiwan R package, including potential applications in discovering legislative factions through network analysis of bill cosponsorship, measuring particularism through text analysis of interpellations, and estimating ideal points using roll call votes with existing R community packages. To facilitate cross-national comparative research, we demonstrate how researchers can utilize our integration interfaces with major European parliamentary corpora such as ParSpeech V2 (Rauh and Schwalbach, 2020) and ParlEEE (Sylvester et al., 2024), enabling the incorporation of Taiwan’s legislative data into cross-national parliamentary research.

Authors

• Shaka Y.J. Li, Florida State University

• Yen-Chieh Liao, University of Birmingham