Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

lpanda 0.2.0 (2025-11-28)

Changes

• Renamed sample datasets used for testing:
  • sample_different_varnames (formerly sample_diff_varnames).
  • sample_no_switching (formerly sample_no_crossing).

New features

• plot_continuity() gains a new argument show_candidate_networks. It adds an additional bottom panel visualising candidate network snapshots for each selected election. The snapshots highlight candidates running in the focal election, show earlier candidates as smaller background nodes, and reflect group affiliations (e.g., parties or cores) through node colours and candidate lists through node boundaries.

New data

• Added municipalities:
  • Bublava_SO_cz
  • Cernosice_PZ_cz
  • Dasnice_SO_cz
  • Horomerice_PZ_cz
  • Hradce_CB_cz
  • Kamenna_CB_cz
  • Nebanice_CH_cz
  • Potucky_KV_cz
  • Prameny_CH_cz
  • Roztoky_PZ_cz
• New sample dataset for testing:
  • sample_no_pluralism - variant of sample_data with only one candidate list per election.

Improvements

• plot_continuity() no longer requires grouping information (e.g., parties) when marking a specific candidate via mark = c("candidate", "<name>"). The function now highlights the candidate and their lists even in ungrouped datasets, avoiding unnecessary community detection.

Bug fixes

• Fixed crashes and encoding issues on non-UTF-8 systems caused by data containing diacritics.
  • Added automatic ASCII fallback for non-UTF-8 systems and locales.
  • plot_continuity() now detects the UTF-8 capability of the current graphics device. It automatically switches to ASCII mode when running in non-interactive or CI environments, or when the device cannot render UTF-8.
  • Added global options:
    • lpanda.text_encoding — "auto" (default) | "utf8" | "ascii"
    • lpanda.plot_family — default "sans"
    • lpanda.force_ascii — default FALSE
  • Text encoding can also be specified as a text_encoding argument via ... in plotting functions.
• plot_continuity() now properly resets layout to prevent occasional overlapping plots.

Documentation

• help("lpanda") / ?lpanda now provide basic package information, including an overview of the basic workflow, main functions, datasets, and references.
• Added pkgdown website: https://localpolitics.github.io/lpanda/.
• Updated documentation for municipalities and sample datasets.

lpanda 0.1.1 (2025-08-26)

CRAN release: 2025-09-01

Bug fixes

• plot_continuity() now always restores graphical parameters (even if an error occurs).

lpanda 0.1.0 (2025-08-18)

• Initial CRAN submission.

New features

• prepare_network_data() - creates network edgelists and node attributes for candidates, lists, continuity, parties, cores and elections.
• plot_continuity() - visualizes the continuity of candidate lists across elections as a time-based diagram using igraph package.

New data

• Municipalities:
  • Doubice_DC_cz
  • Jilove_DC_cz
• Example data:
  • sample_data
• Variants for tests:
  • sample_diff_varnames
  • sample_binary_values
  • sample_no_continuity
  • sample_no_crossing