Load the package with:
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:
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.
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")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