Average Age of Members of Congress

Introduction

Analyzing the age of members of the United States congress over the years. The data of interest is saved in the congress_age data frame included in the fivethirtyeight package. To understand the data’s context, first read:

• The original FiveThirtyEight article the data was used in. In particular the first visualization titled “Average Age of Members of Congress”

Data Wrangling

avg_congress_age<- congress_age %>% 
  group_by(termstart,party) %>% 
  filter(party=="D"|party=="R") %>% 
  summarize(mean_age=mean(age)) %>% 
  select(party,termstart,mean_age)

## `summarise()` has grouped output by 'termstart'. You can override using the `.groups` argument.

avg_congress_age

## # A tibble: 68 × 3
## # Groups:   termstart [34]
##    party termstart  mean_age
##    <chr> <date>        <dbl>
##  1 D     1947-01-03     52.0
##  2 R     1947-01-03     53.0
##  3 D     1949-01-03     51.4
##  4 R     1949-01-03     54.6
##  5 D     1951-01-03     52.3
##  6 R     1951-01-03     54.3
##  7 D     1953-01-03     52.3
##  8 R     1953-01-03     54.1
##  9 D     1955-01-05     52.3
## 10 R     1955-01-05     54.7
## # … with 58 more rows

Data Visualization