getAllLocalOfficials: Fetch data on all local (city- or county-) officials
In umatter/pvsR: Interact with the Project Vote Smart API for Scientific Research

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Author(s) References Examples

This function is essentially a wrapper around Local.getOfficials().

1 2	getAllLocalOfficials(locality="counties", batchsize=50, pause=0, backupfile="locofs.list.Rdata")

`locality`	a character string indicating whether data on county-officials ("counties") or city-officials ("cities") should be downloaded.
`batchsize`	numerical, indicating the number of requests that should be processed in one batch (defaults to 50).
`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: "locofs.list.Rdata").

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.

A data frame with a row for each official and columns with the following variables describing the official:
candidatelist.candidate*.candidateId,
candidatelist.candidate*.firstName,
candidatelist.candidate*.nickName,
candidatelist.candidate*.middleName,
candidatelist.candidate*.lastName,
candidatelist.candidate*.suffix,
candidatelist.candidate*.title,
candidatelist.candidate*.electionParties,
candidatelist.candidate*.electionDistrictId,
candidatelist.candidate*.electionStateId,
candidatelist.candidate*.officeParties,
candidatelist.candidate*.officeDistrictId,
candidatelist.candidate*.officeDistrictName,
candidatelist.candidate*.officeStateId,
candidatelist.candidate*.officeId,
candidatelist.candidate*.officeName,
candidatelist.candidate*.officeTypeId.

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

http://api.votesmart.org/docs/Local.html
Use Local.getCounties() or Local.getCities() to get a list of local IDs.
See also: Matter U, Stutzer A (2015) pvsR: An Open Source Interface to Big Data on the American Political Sphere. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0130501. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0130501

# First, make sure your personal PVS API key is saved as an option
# (options("pvs.key" = "yourkey")) or in the pvs.key variable:
## Not run: pvs.key <- "yourkey"
# get a list of all local officials
## Not run: all_countyofficials <- getAllLocalOfficials()
## Not run: head(officials)