pvsR (version 0.1.1)

Votes.getByOfficial: Get all the bills an official has voted on by year

Description

This function is a wrapper for the Votes.getByOfficial() method of the PVS API Votes class which dumps all the bills an official has voted on based on the candidateId and year. The function sends a request with this method to the PVS API for all candidate IDs and years given as a function input, extracts the XML values from the returned XML file(s) and returns them arranged in one data frame.

Usage

Votes.getByOfficial(year, candidateId)

Arguments

year

a character string or list of character strings with the year(s)

candidateId

a character string or list of character strings with the candidate ID(s) (see references for details)

Value

• A data frame with a row for each bill and columns with variables describing the bill. The returned data frame contains a row for each bill and columns with the following variables describing the bill: bills.bill*.billId, bills.bill*.billNumber, bills.bill*.title, bills.bill.categories.category*.categoryId, bills.bill.categories.category*.name, bills.bill*.officeId, bills.bill*.office, bills.bill*.vote, bills.bill*.actionId, bills.bill*.stage.

References

http://api.votesmart.org/docs/Votes.html Use Candidates.getByOfficeState(), Candidates.getByOfficeTypeState(), Candidates.getByLastname(), Candidates.getByLevenshtein(), Candidates.getByElection(), Candidates.getByDistrict() or Candidates.getByZip() to get a list of candidate IDs.

Examples

# First, make sure your personal PVS API key is saved as character string in the pvs.key variable:
pvs.key <- "yourkey"
# get additional biographical data on Barak Obama
votes <- Votes.getByOfficial(as.list(2010:2012),9490)
votes