This package is a wrapper around the VoteSmart API written by your friendly neighborhood progressive tech organization, 🌟 Deck Technologies 🌟. Feel free to use this package in any way you like.
VoteSmart provides information on US political candidates’ positions on issues, votes on bills, and ratings by third party organizations, among other data.
install.packages("votesmart")
Or the development version:
devtools::install_github("decktools/votesmart", build_vignettes = TRUE)
You’ll need a VoteSmart API key in order to use this package. You can register for one here.
Store your key in an environment variable named VOTESMART_API_KEY
with
Sys.setenv(VOTESMART_API_KEY = "<your_key>")
You can check that it’s there with
Sys.getenv("VOTESMART_API_KEY")
This package never stores your key in your R session’s global environment.
VoteSmart collects ratings on various issues that Special Interest Groups (SIGs) give to political candidates.
Let’s say we want to know how Elizabeth Warren tends to be rated on a few issues.
library(votesmart) suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(dplyr)) conflicted::conflict_prefer("filter", "dplyr") #> [conflicted] Will prefer dplyr::filter over any other package.
We’ll first want to know what her VoteSmart candidate_id
is. We can search for her using candidates_get_by_lastname
:
warrens <- candidates_get_by_lastname( "warren", election_years = 2012 ) #> Requesting data for {last_name: warren, election_year: 2012, stage_id: }. knitr::kable(warrens)candidate_id first_name nick_name middle_name last_name suffix title ballot_name stage_id election_year preferred_name election_parties election_status election_stage election_district_id election_district_name election_office election_office_id election_state_id election_office_type_id election_special election_date office_parties office_status office_district_id office_district_name office_state_id office_id office_name office_type_id running_mate_id running_mate_name 139104 Adam NA Lee Warren NA NA Adam Lee Warren 2012 Adam Republican Lost Primary NA NA Attorney General 12 MO S FALSE 08/07/2012 NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA 103860 Dennis NA NA Warren NA NA Dennis C. Warren 2012 Dennis Republican Withdrawn General 28446 16 State Senate 9 ID L FALSE 11/06/2012 NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA 141272 Elizabeth NA Ann Warren NA Senator Elizabeth A. Warren 2012 Elizabeth Democratic Won General NA NA U.S. Senate 6 MA C FALSE 11/06/2012 Democratic active 20512 Sr MA 6 U.S. Senate C NA NA 117839 Harry NA Joseph Warren NA Representative Harry Warren 2012 Harry Republican Won General 25520 77 State House 8 NC L FALSE 11/06/2012 Republican active 25519 76 NC 8 State House L NA NA 138202 Pete NA NA Warren NA NA Pete Warren 2012 Pete Republican Removed Primary 21842 30 State House 8 FL L FALSE 08/14/2012 NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA 137066 Stephen NA NA Warren NA NA Stephen Warren 2012 Stephen Republican Lost Primary 27865 22B State House 8 ID L FALSE 05/15/2012 NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA 135832 Tom NA NA Warren NA NA Tom Warren 2012 Tom Democratic Lost General 25782 76 State House 8 OH L FALSE 11/06/2012 NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA 139311 Wesley NA G. Warren NA NA Wesley G. Warren 2012 Wesley Republican Lost General 21874 62 State House 8 FL L FALSE 11/06/2012 NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
Filtering to her first name and taking her candidate_id
, we can now grab Warren’s ratings by all SIGs with rating_get_candidate_ratings
.
(id <- warrens %>% filter(first_name == "Elizabeth") %>% pull(candidate_id) ) #> [1] "141272" ratings <- rating_get_candidate_ratings( candidate_ids = id, ) #> Requesting data for {candidate_id: 141272, sig_id: }. knitr::kable(ratings %>% sample_n(3))rating_id candidate_id sig_id rating rating_name timespan rating_text category_id_1 category_name_1 category_id_2 category_name_2 category_id_3 category_name_3 category_id_4 category_name_4 category_id_5 category_name_5 category_id_6 category_name_6 category_id_7 category_name_7 category_id_8 category_name_8 category_id_9 category_name_9 8615 141272 1161 100 Positions 2014 Senator Elizabeth Warren supported the interests of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) 100 percent in 2014. 43 Labor Unions NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA 10219 141272 2412 18 Lifetime Positions 2016 Senator Elizabeth Warren supported the interests of the Conservative Review 18 percent in 2016. 17 Conservative NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA 9705 141272 1985 1 Positions 2017-2018 Senator Elizabeth Warren supported the interests of the NumbersUSA 1 percent in 2017-2018. 40 Immigration NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
And compute on them:
ratings %>% filter( category_name_1 %in% c( "Environment", "Fiscally Conservative", "Education", "Civil Liberties and Civil Rights", "Campaign Finance" ) ) %>% group_by(category_name_1) %>% summarise( avg_rating = mean(as.numeric(rating), na.rm = TRUE) ) %>% arrange(category_name_1) #> # A tibble: 5 × 2 #> category_name_1 avg_rating #> <chr> <dbl> #> 1 Campaign Finance 100 #> 2 Civil Liberties and Civil Rights 86.6 #> 3 Education 89.3 #> 4 Environment 87.2 #> 5 Fiscally Conservative 8.78
For more in-depth examples of how these all fit together, check out the vignette with:
These functions are named after the snake_case
d version of the API endpoints.
If you see an endpoint you want to be made available in this package that isn’t yet, feel free to submit an issue or a pull request!
candidates_get_by_lastname
Get a dataframe of candidates given a vector of last_name
s, election_year
s (optional, defaulting to current year), and stage_id
s (optional)
candidates_get_by_levenshtein
Get a dataframe of fuzzy-matched candidates given a vector of last_name
s, election_year
s (optional), and stage_id
s (optional)
candidates_get_by_office_state
Get a dataframe of candidates by the state in which they ran for office given a vector of state_id
s (optional), office_id
s, and election_year
s (optional)
election_get_election_by_year_state
Get a dataframe of election ids and their attributes given a vector of year
s and state_id
s (optional)
measure_get_measures
Get a dataframe of ballot measure attributes given a measure_id
measure_get_measures_by_year_state
Get a dataframe of ballot measure ids and their attributes given a vector of year
s and state_id
s (optional)
office_get_levels
Get the VoteSmart office_level_id
s and their associated names (federal, state, local)
office_get_offices_by_level
Get office_id
s and their associated names (e.g. "President"
) for a given office_level_id
rating_get_candidate_ratings
Get SIG (Special Interest Group) ratings for candidates given a candidate_id
and a sig_id
(optional)
rating_get_categories
Get rating category_id
s and their associated name
s (e.g. "Abortion"
, "Environment"
) given a vector of state_id
s (optional)
rating_get_sig
Get information about a vector of SIGs (Special Interest Groups) given a sig_id
rating_get_sig_list
Get a dataframe of SIG (Special Interest Group) given a rating category_id
and a state_id
(optional)
votes_get_by_official
Get a dataframe of the way officials have voted on bills given a candidate_id
, an office_id
(optional), a category_id
(optional) and a year
the vote occurred (optional)
Only a subset of all of the VoteSmart endpoints have yet been made available through this package.
You can see a full dataframe of the VoteSmart endpoints and their associated arguments with
data("endpoint_input_mapping")
or
data("endpoint_input_mapping_nested")
This package currently contains no rate limiting infrastructure as there is very little information about what rate limits VoteSmart imposes, if any
The VoteSmart API does not allow for bulk requests, i.e. a single request can only contain one value for each parameter
Feel free to reach out in the Issues with any bugs or feature requests! 💫
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