An R package for accessing and processing the Manifesto Project’s Data and Corpus of election programmes.
Provides access to coded election programmes from the Manifesto Corpus and to the Manifesto Project’s Main Dataset and routines to analyse this data. The Manifesto Project https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu collects and analyses election programmes across time and space to measure the political preferences of parties. The Manifesto Corpus contains the collected and annotated election programmes in the Corpus format of the package ‘tm’ to enable easy use of text processing and text mining functionality. Specific functions for scaling of coded political texts are included. See https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu for additional tutorials, documentation, data, and election programmes.
You can install the package from CRAN:
install.packages("manifestoR")
Then a typical script or session with manifestoR
starts
like this:
library(manifestoR)
mp_setapikey("manifesto_apikey.txt") ## create and download your API key at https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu before
## download election programmes texts and codings
election_programmes <- mp_corpus(countryname == "Bulgaria")
## for example:
head(content(election_programmes[[1]])) ## view beginning of text of first manifesto
table(codes(election_programmes)) ## count codes of all manifestos
## ...
The main user documentation is the vignette
manifestoRworkflow
. It walks you through the package’s
central functions giving many example code bits. For detailed
information about all functions and parameters, pleaser refer to the
functions’ documentations with R’s ?
or the packages
Reference Manual.
If you want to contribute to the development of
manifestoR
by reporting bugs, proposing features or writing
program code, you are invited to do this on the package’s github page:
https://github.com/ManifestoProject/manifestoR.
Developers, please also note the information on packing and testing
manifestoR
below.
Stable major versions of manifestoR
will be provided on
CRAN, such that you can install and update them via R’s base functions
install.packages
and update.packages
. A
development version is available on github, which you can install to get
the most recent features and bugfixes.
Note that the NAMESPACE
file and documentation are not
part of the github repository, since they are generated automatically.
Hence installation with devtools
via
install_github
is not possible. Instead, you can clone the
master branch of the repository and a Makefile
will come
with the source code. make install
packs and installs the
package (and documentation) to your default R installation, requiring
devtools
to be installed.
The Makefile in the github repository contains several other targets helpful for developing:
make
(=make all
) packs the package (and
documentation) to a tarball in the parent directory.
You can run the tests provided together with the source code with
make test
. Note that this requires a file with a valid
Manifesto Project DB API Key in the file
tests/manifesto_apikey.txt
.
make check
checks the package.
Build dependencies:
To pack the source and documentation from this folder into a package tarball your system needs to have installed:
devtools
and roxygen2
knitr
(for documentation)texlive-fonts-extra
(for documentation)