A collection of useful tools for UK politics, including base maps and
datasets. Initially inspired by Bhaskar Karambelkar’s tilegrams
package, but with the ability to create a hexagonal map of UK
parliamentary constituencies and local authorities. The package also
includes functions for data retrieval of current MPs and their
consituency details (as it requires calls to two different APIs, this
function is not included in my hansard
or mnis
packages), and local government composition. There are inbuilt datasets
from the 2015 and 2017 UK General Elections and 2011 Census, courtesy of
the British Election Study, estimates of EU referendum votes from Chris
Hanretty, and hex codes for different party colours.
The most up-to-date documentation will always be at http://docs.evanodell.com/parlitools/.
Installing
parlitools is available on CRAN. To install on CRAN
run:
install.packages("parlitools")Or, if you use pacman:
pacman::p_load(parlitools)To install the development version from GitHub, run:
##install.packages("parlitools")
devtools::install_github("evanodell/parlitools")Functions and Data
For more details see the full documentation or the vignettes.
Included Data
party_colour - A tibble with the ID, name and hex code
for the official colour of a variety of political parties, taken from
Wikipedia. Includes all political parties with MPs and a number without
MPs. (Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Index_of_United_Kingdom_political_parties_meta_attributes,
mnis::ref_parties())
bes_2015 - A tibble with the British Election Study 2015
Constituency Results Version 2.2. For information on all the variables
in this dataset, see the bes-2015
vignette (Source: http://www.britishelectionstudy.com/data-object/2015-bes-constituency-results-with-census-and-candidate-data/)
bes_2017 - A tibble with Great Britain constituencies
results from the 2017 general election. This data can be linked to 2011
census information in census_11.
census_11 - A tibble with constituency-level census
data.
leave_votes_west - The percentage of votes cast for
leave in the 2016 EU referendum. Some constituencies have actual results
and others only have estimates by Chris Hanretty; in cases where the
actual cote count is known, both the estimates and the actual results
are reported. (Sources: Hanretty, C. (2017). Areal interpolation and the
UK’s referendum on EU membership. Journal of Elections, Public
Opinion and Parties, 27(4), 466–483. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2017.1287081, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-36616830)
Data Retrieval Functions
current_mps - Uses functions from hansard
and mnis to create a tibble with data on all current MPs,
their party affiliation and their constituency.
mps_on_date - Uses functions from hansard
and mnis to create a tibble with data on all MPs from a
given date, their party affiliation and their constituency.
west_hex_map - A hexagonal cartogram, stored as a simple
feature and data frame, of Westminster parliamentary constituencies.
west_hex_map can be used to create maps like this:
local_hex_map - Hexagonal cartogram, A hexagonal
cartogram, stored as a simple feature and data frame, of all Local
Authorities in England, Wales and Scotland.
Using parlitools
For more details, please see the introductory
vignette, using
parlitools with cartogram, mapping
local authorities and the vignette detailing British
Election Study 2015 variables.
Data Sources
There are a variety of potentially relevant data sources and datasets on UK politics, far too many for me to include them all in this package.
-
- Electoral results dating back to 2005.
-
- A large selection of open data, including panel surveys, linked data and aggregated Twitter data, covering elections and referenda.
My
hansard&mnisdata retrieval packages for parliamentary APIs.Open Council Data has data on the names, parties, and wards of all UK councillors, updated more or less weekly.
parlitoolsuses this site to power thecouncil_seats()function.
