getAllBios: Get several candidates' biographical information

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

Description

This function is essentially a wrapper around CandidateBio.getBio() specified for large amount of requests.

Usage

getAllBios(candidateId, batchsize=100, pause=0, backupfile="bios.list.Rdata")

Arguments

candidateId	a character string or list of character strings with the candidate ID(s) (see references for details)
batchsize	numerical, indicating how many candidateIds should be processed in one batch (defaults to 100).
pause	numerical, indicating how long (in seconds) the download process should be paused after each batch (defaults to 0)
backupfile	character string for the path/file-name of the Rdata-file where the data should be saved (batch-wise) during the download process (default: "bios.list.Rdata").

Details

This functions splits large requests into several batches. The requests are then processed batch-wise and are saved on the local disc to make sure that not too much RAM is assigned to the pvsR task.

Value

A data frame with a row for each candidate and columns with the following variables describing the candidate:
bio.candidate.crpId (OpenSecrets ID),
bio.candidate.firstName,
bio.candidate.nickName,
bio.candidate.middleName,
bio.candidate.lastName,
bio.candidate.suffix,
bio.candidate.birthDate,
bio.candidate.birthPlace,
bio.candidate.pronunciation,
bio.candidate.gender,
bio.candidate.family,
bio.candidate.photo,
bio.candidate.homeCity,
bio.candidate.homeState,
bio.candidate.education,
bio.candidate.profession,
bio.candidate.political,
bio.candidate.religion,
bio.candidate.congMembership,
bio.candidate.orgMembership,
bio.candidate.specialMsg,
bio.office.parties,
bio.office.title,
bio.office.shortTitle,
bio.office.name,
bio.office.type,
bio.office.status,
bio.office.firstElect,
bio.office.lastElect,
bio.office.nextElect,
bio.office.termStart,
bio.office.termEnd,
bio.office.district,
bio.office.districtId,
bio.office.stateId,
bio.office.committee*.committeeId,
bio.office.committee*.committeeName,
bio.election*.office,
bio.election*.officeId,
bio.election*.officeType,
bio.election*.parties,
bio.election*.district,
bio.election*.districtId,
bio.election*.status,
bio.election*.ballotName.

Author(s)

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

References

http://api.votesmart.org/docs/CandidateBio.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 all officials of a certain state
## Not run: officials <- Officials.getStatewide("FL")
# get all biographical information on those officials
## Not run: bios <- getAllBios(officials$candidateId[1:100], batchsize=20)
## Not run: head(bios)

Example output

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