Introduction to AustralianPoliticians

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Default usage

Load the package with:

library(AustralianPoliticians)

The purpose of AustralianPoliticians is to make it easier to access biographical and political data about Australian federal politicians. This is done through the use of functions that get and manipulate publicly accessible datasets that were constructed for this purpose. These datasets have every politician in the House of Representatives and the Senate between 1901 and 2021. To get started with the package:

Show data request codes

Request codes are used to access the specific datasets in AustralianPoliticians. These codes used in conjunction with the get_auspol() function allow for a dataset to be downloaded and assigned a variable name. The show_datacodes() function prints these codes to the console as a tibble.

show_datacodes()
# A tibble: 4 x 2
  request_code dataset                                     
  <chr>        <chr>                                       
1 all          australian_politicians-all.csv              
2 allbyparty   australian_politicians-all-by_party.csv     
3 mps          australian_politicians-mps-by_division.csv  
4 senators     australian_politicians-senators-by_state.csv

Download Australian Politician data

Each of the shown codes is associated with a .csv dataset. The get_auspol() function is used to download these datasets, allowing them to be assigned to a variable. To function correctly, the argument passed to get_auspol() must be a character string. If get_auspol() is called without being assigned to a variable it will print out a preview to the requested dataset to the console, as seen below.

get_auspol("all")
# A tibble: 1,781 x 20                                                                    
   uniqueID  surname allOtherNames firstName commonName
   <chr>     <chr>   <chr>         <chr>     <chr>     
 1 Abbott18~ Abbott  Richard Hart~ Richard   NA        
 2 Abbott18~ Abbott  Percy Phipps  Percy     NA        
 3 Abbott18~ Abbott  Macartney     Macartney Mac       
 4 Abbott18~ Abbott  Charles Lydi~ Charles   Aubrey    
 5 Abbott18~ Abbott  Joseph Palmer Joseph    NA        
 6 Abbott19~ Abbott  Anthony John  Anthony   Tony      
 7 Abel1939  Abel    John Arthur   John      NA        
 8 Abetz1958 Abetz   Eric          Eric      NA        
 9 Adams1943 Adams   Judith Anne   Judith    NA        
10 Adams1951 Adams   Dick Godfrey~ Dick      NA        
# ... with 1,771 more rows, and 15 more variables:
#   displayName <chr>, earlierOrLaterNames <chr>,
#   title <chr>, gender <chr>, birthDate <date>,
#   birthYear <dbl>, birthPlace <chr>,
#   deathDate <date>, member <dbl>, senator <dbl>,
#   wasPrimeMinister <dbl>, wikidataID <chr>,
#   wikipedia <chr>, adb <chr>, comments <chr>

all_auspol <- get_auspol("all")

House of Representatives and Senate

In some cases, it may be necessary to join datasets to gain more information than is contained in just one dataset. The get_reps_senate() function does this in downloading the house of representatives data or senate data and joins these with the all dataset to show the dates served by a politician in either political sector. It can do this for both datasets, joining house of representatives and senate to all, or for just one of house of representative or senate depending on what is required.

This function also includes an argument that allows for the associated request codes to be printed to the console.

# Return codes used to call datasets
get_reps_senate("codes")
# A tibble: 3 x 2
  request_code dataset                                 
  <chr>        <chr>                                   
1 reps_senate  Generates a dataset of HoRs and Senate ~
2 reps         Generates a dataset of HoRs members     
3 senate       Generates a dataset of Senate members 

# Request HoR and Senate dataset
reps_senate <- get_reps_senate("reps_senate")

# Preview dataset
head(reps_senate)
# A tibble: 6 x 4
  uniqueID   from       to         house
  <chr>      <date>     <date>     <chr>
1 Abbott1869 1913-05-31 1919-11-03 HoR  
2 Abbott1886 1925-11-14 1929-10-12 HoR  
3 Abbott1886 1931-12-19 1937-03-28 HoR  
4 Abbott1891 1940-09-21 1949-10-31 HoR  
5 Abbott1957 1994-03-26 2019-05-18 HoR  
6 Abel1939   1975-12-13 1977-11-10 HoR


# Request HoR dataset
reps <- get_reps_senate("reps")

# Preview dataset
head(reps)
# A tibble: 6 x 4
  uniqueID   from       to         house
  <chr>      <date>     <date>     <chr>
1 Abbott1869 1913-05-31 1919-11-03 HoR  
2 Abbott1886 1925-11-14 1929-10-12 HoR  
3 Abbott1886 1931-12-19 1937-03-28 HoR  
4 Abbott1891 1940-09-21 1949-10-31 HoR  
5 Abbott1957 1994-03-26 2019-05-18 HoR  
6 Abel1939   1975-12-13 1977-11-10 HoR


# Request Senate dataset
senate <- get_reps_senate("senate")

#Preview dataset
head(senate)
# A tibble: 6 x 4
  uniqueID    from       to         house 
  <chr>       <date>     <date>     <chr> 
1 Abbott1859  1928-12-18 1929-06-30 Senate
2 Abbott1869  1925-11-14 1929-06-30 Senate
3 Abbott1877  1935-07-01 1941-06-30 Senate
4 Abetz1958   1994-02-22 NA         Senate
5 Adams1943   2005-07-01 2012-03-31 Senate
6 Adamson1857 1920-07-01 1922-05-02 Senate

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.