Votes.getByOfficial: Get all the bills an official has voted on by year

In pvsR: An R package to interact with the Project Vote Smart API for scientific research

Description

This function is a wrapper for the Votes.getByOfficial() method of the PVS API Votes class which dumps all the bills an official has voted on based on the candidateId and year. The function sends a request with this method to the PVS API for all candidate IDs and years given as a function input, extracts the XML values from the returned XML file(s) and returns them arranged in one data frame.

Usage

Votes.getByOfficial(year, candidateId)

Arguments

year	a character string or list of character strings with the year(s)
candidateId	a character string or list of character strings with the candidate ID(s) (see references for details)

Value

A data frame with a row for each bill and columns with the following variables describing the bill:
bills.bill*.billId,
bills.bill*.billNumber,
bills.bill*.title,
bills.bill.categories.category*.categoryId,
bills.bill.categories.category*.name,
bills.bill*.officeId,
bills.bill*.office,
bills.bill*.vote,
bills.bill*.actionId,
bills.bill*.stage.

Author(s)

Ulrich Matter <ulrich.matter-at-unibas.ch>

References

http://api.votesmart.org/docs/Votes.html
Use Candidates.getByOfficeState(), Candidates.getByOfficeTypeState(), Candidates.getByLastname(), Candidates.getByLevenshtein(), Candidates.getByElection(), Candidates.getByDistrict() or Candidates.getByZip() to get a list of candidate IDs.

Examples

# First, make sure your personal PVS API key is saved as character string in the pvs.key variable:
## Not run: pvs.key <- "yourkey"
# get additional biographical data on Barack Obama
## Not run: votes <- Votes.getByOfficial(as.list(2010:2012),9490)
## Not run: votes

pvsR documentation built on May 2, 2019, 5:16 a.m.