parlitools

A collection of useful tools for UK politics, including base maps and
datasets. Initially inspired by Bhaskar Karambelkar’s
tilegrams package,
but with the ability to create a hexagonal map of UK parliamentary
constituencies and local authorities. The package also includes
functions for data retrieval of current MPs and their consituency
details (as it requires calls to two different APIs, this function is
not included in my
hansard or
mnis packages), and local
government composition. There are inbuilt datasets from the 2015 and
2017 UK General Elections and 2011 Census, courtesy of the British
Election Study, estimates of EU referendum votes from Chris Hanretty,
and hex codes for different party colours.

The most up-to-date documentation will always be at
http://docs.evanodell.com/parlitools.

Installing

parlitools is available on CRAN. To install on CRAN run:

install.packages("parlitools")

Or, if you use pacman:

pacman::p_load(parlitools)

To install the development version from GitHub, run:

##install.packages("parlitools")
devtools::install_github("evanodell/parlitools")

Functions and Data

For more details see the full
documentation or the
vignettes.

Included Data

party_colour - A tibble with the ID, name and hex code for the
official colour of a variety of political parties, taken from Wikipedia.
Includes all political parties with MPs and a number without MPs.
(Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Index_of_United_Kingdom_political_parties_meta_attributes,
mnis::ref_parties())

bes_2015 - A tibble with the British Election Study 2015 Constituency
Results Version 2.2. For information on all the variables in this
dataset, see the bes-2015
vignette
(Source:
http://www.britishelectionstudy.com/data-object/2015-bes-constituency-results-with-census-and-candidate-data)

bes_2017 - A tibble with Great Britain constituencies results from the
2017 general election. This data can be linked to 2011 census
information in
census_11.

census_11 - A tibble with constituency-level census data.

leave_votes_west - The percentage of votes cast for leave in the 2016
EU referendum. Some constituencies have actual results and others only
have estimates by Chris Hanretty; in cases where the actual cote count
is known, both the estimates and the actual results are reported.
(Sources: Hanretty, C. (2017). Areal interpolation and the UK’s
referendum on EU membership. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and
Parties, 27(4), 466–483.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2017.1287081,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-36616830)

Data Retrieval Functions

current_mps - Uses functions from hansard and mnis to create a
tibble with data on all current MPs, their party affiliation and their
constituency.

mps_on_date - Uses functions from hansard and mnis to create a
tibble with data on all MPs from a given date, their party affiliation
and their constituency.

west_hex_map - A hexagonal cartogram, stored as a simple feature and
data frame, of Westminster parliamentary constituencies. west_hex_map
can be used to create maps like this:

local_hex_map - Hexagonal cartogram, A hexagonal cartogram, stored as
a simple feature and data frame, of all Local Authorities in England,
Wales and Scotland.

Using parlitools

For more details, please see the introductory
vignette,
using parlitools with
cartogram,
mapping local
authorities
and the vignette detailing British Election
Study 2015
variables.

Data Sources

There are a variety of potentially relevant data sources and datasets on
UK politics, far too many for me to include them all in this package.

• Electoral
  Commission

  • Electoral results dating back to 2005.

• British Election Study

  • A large selection of open data, including panel surveys, linked
    data and aggregated Twitter data, covering elections and referenda.

• My hansard &
  mnis data retrieval
  packages for parliamentary APIs.

• Open Council Data has data on the
  names, parties, and wards of all UK councillors, updated more or
  less weekly. parlitools uses this site to power the
  council_seats() function.