swissparl: Interface to the Webservices of the Swiss Parliament

`swissparl`

This R package prototype is an interface to the Webservices of the The Federal Assembly — The Swiss Parliament that offer an open, machine-readable interface to the most important data on parliamentary activities.

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("zumbov2/swissparl/old_ws/package")

Let's find out how Cédric Wermuth and Thomas Aeschi voted on the corporate tax reform (USR III) back in 2016. First, we need to get their IDs.

# Fetching all current councillors
clrs <- swissparl::get_councillors()

# Exracting IDs
ids <- clrs %>% 
  dplyr::filter(lastName %in% c("Wermuth", "Aeschi")) %>% 
  dplyr::pull(number)

Now we also need the ID of the affair. Unfortunately the affair overview retrieved with get_affairs() doesn't contain a title variable. That's why we need to fetch the affair details...this may take some time. At least I remember that the Federal Council presented the bill in 2015. This "speeds" things up a little.

# Fetching all bills/affairs of 2015
afrs <- swissparl::get_affair_details2(year = 2015)

# Exracting ID
bill <- afrs %>% 
  dplyr::filter(stringr::str_detect(title, "Unternehmenssteuerreformgesetz III")) %>% 
  dplyr::pull(id)

Now we have all the information we need to perform the actual query.

# Retrieving voting behavior 
vbh <- swissparl::get_votes_councillors(councillor_id = ids, affair_id = bill)

# Analyzing
vbh %>%
  dplyr::select(lastName, vote.id, councillorVote.decision) %>% 
  tidyr::spread(lastName, councillorVote.decision) %>% 
  dplyr::mutate(same = ifelse(Aeschi == Wermuth, 1, 0)) %>% 
  dplyr::group_by(same) %>% 
  dplyr::count()

They voted the same in 7 out of 41 cases...there are councillors who vote more similarly.

The package offers various wrapper functions that enable the mass retrieval of data: see get_affair_details2(), get_councillor_details2(), get_affairsummaries2(), get_faction_members2(), get_committee_members2(), get_votes_affairs2() and get_votes_councillors2().