News

parlitools 0.3.0

• parlitools no longer stores local council party data. The most up-to-date data on the political make-up of local councils and individual councillors can be be accessed with the new council_seats() function.

• Updated the leave_votes_west dataset to include the latest best-estimates of constituency level votes from Chris Hanretty and the actual votes, where known.

• Fixed errors caused by duplicated vignette names.

• Eliminated some dependencies.

parlitools 0.2.3

• Changed party_id in the party_colour dataset to a character vector.

• Otherwise very minor update, some tweaks to docs layout.

parlitools 0.2.2

Data

• Updating of council_data dataset to be accurate as of 2017-11-24.

parlitools 0.2.1

Data

• Updating of council_data dataset to be accurate as of 2017-09-13.

• Added combined_leave_vote column to leave_votes_west dataset with the actual leave vote if known and the Chris Hanretty estimate if not known.

• Vote percentages in leave_votes_west are now all numeric class.

Dependency changes

• Removed reliance on now-hidden functions from mnis and hansard packages.

General improvements

• Improvements to documentation to improve clarity and readability.

• Better example plots in introductory vignette.

• The tidying functions are now all internal to the package and not exported.

parlitools 0.2.0

Data

• New bes_2017 dataset, with results of 2017 General Election, taken from the 2017 British Election Study. This dataset replaces the ge_2017 dataset. It also replicates some of the data in the bes_2015 dataset.

• Census data from the British Election Study has been moved to its own separate file, named census11.

Fixes

• Naming conventions for variables now places an underscore between each distinct word (eg onsconst_id is now ons_const_id).

parlitools 0.1.0

• Changes to vignettes to comply with CRAN policies and to reduce the time needed to check the package.

• Reduction in the number of similar vignette examples to reduce build time.

Data

• Updating of council_data dataset to be accurate as of 2017-07-14.

• New ge_2017 dataset, with results of 2017 General Election, linked with constituency data from bes_2015.

Bug fixes

• Consistent naming of vote variables in bes_2015.

parlitools 0.0.7

• Updated documentation, more comprehensive testing. Added Northern Irish EU Referendum results to the leave_votes_west dataset.

parlitools 0.0.6

Bug fixes

• Fixed bugs in mps_on_date() that were causing problems on Windows.

parlitools 0.0.5

Data updates

• Added leave_votes_west containing estimates and - where available - official counts of the proportion of leave votes in the 2016 EU referendum.

parlitools 0.0.4

Data updates

• Updated bes_2015 to use V2.21 from the British Election Study.

• Added council_data dataset, with details on the parties controlling local councils across the UK.

Bug Fixes

• A few minor tweaks to internal code, and to the vignette examples.

parlitools 0.0.3

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug in mps_on_date where function did not return constituency data. mps_on_date also now accepts dates in any format or class that can be converted with as.Date() to a date format.

• Fixed names party names in party_colour to align with names used in bes_2015.

• Fixed spelling mistakes in Endiburgh constituency names in bes_2015.

New Features

• Added optional tidy_style parameter in current_mps() and mps_on_date(), allowing users to decide which style snake_case, camelCase and period.case they want variable names to be in, if 'tidy'==TRUE.

parlitools 0.0.2

• Added an additional vignette on using the data in parlitools to create scaled maps with the cartogram package.

Maps

• Now includes local_hex_map, a hexagonal map of all local authority areas in Scotland, Wales and England.

Data Retrieval

• The mps_on_date function downloads information on every MP and their constituency who was a member of the house on a single given date, or between two given dates.

parlitools 0.0.1

Introducing parlitools

• Introducing parlitools, a package for retrieving and analysing UK political data. The package includes datasets from the British Election Study, a hexagonal map of all UK constituencies, and party colour hex codes.

Data

• The package includes a dataset with 2015 General Election results and census information for each constituency in Scotland, Wales and England, taken from the British Election Study.

• The package also includes a dataset (party_colours) with the hex code for the official colours of UK political parties.

Maps

• Includes a hexagonal map (west_hex_map) of all 650 constituencies in the UK.

Data Retrieval

• The current_mps function downloads information on every sitting MP and their constituency.

Reference manual