ManifestoR

An R package for accessing and processing the Manifesto Project's Data and Corpus of election programmes.

Description

Provides access to coded election programmes from the Manifesto Corpus and to the Manifesto Project's Main Dataset and routines to analyse this data. The Manifesto Project https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu collects and analyses election programmes across time and space to measure the political preferences of parties. The Manifesto Corpus contains the collected and annotated election programmes in the Corpus format of the package 'tm' to enable easy use of text processing and text mining functionality. Specific functions for scaling of coded political texts are included. See https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu for additional tutorials, documentation, data, and election programmes.

Quick Start Guide

You can install the package from CRAN:

install.packages("manifestoR")

Then a typical script or session with manifestoR starts like this:

library(manifestoR)
mp_setapikey("manifesto_apikey.txt") ## create and download your API key at https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu before

## download election programmes texts and codings
election_programmes <- mp_corpus(countryname == "Bulgaria")

## for example:
head(content(election_programmes[[1]])) ## view beginning of text of first manifesto
table(codes(election_programmes)) ## count codes of all manifestos

## ...

Documentation

The main user documentation is the vignette manifestoRworkflow. It walks you through the package's central functions giving many example code bits. For detailed information about all functions and parameters, pleaser refer to the functions' documentations with R's ? or the packages Reference Manual.

Contributing

If you want to contribute to the development of manifestoR by reporting bugs, proposing features or writing program code, you are invited to do this on the package's github page: https://github.com/ManifestoProject/manifestoR. Developers, please also note the information on packing and testing manifestoR below.

Alternative versions and installation methods

Stable major versions of manifestoR will be provided on CRAN, such that you can install and update them via R's base functions install.packages and update.packages. A development version is available on github, which you can install to get the most recent features and bugfixes.

Installation from github

Note that the NAMESPACE file and documentation are not part of the github repository, since they are generated automatically. Hence installation with devtools via install_github is not possible. Instead, you can clone the master branch of the repository and a Makefile will come with the source code. make install packs and installs the package (and documentation) to your default R installation, requiring devtools to be installed.

Developing: from a local source copy

The Makefile in the github repository contains several other targets helpful for developing:

make (=make all) packs the package (and documentation) to a tarball in the parent directory.

You can run the tests provided together with the source code with make test. Note that this requires a file with a valid Manifesto Project DB API Key in the file tests/manifesto_apikey.txt.

make check checks the package.

Build dependencies:

To pack the source and documentation from this folder into a package tarball your system needs to have installed:

• R packages devtools and roxygen2
• R packages knitr (for documentation)
• texlive-fonts-extra (for documentation)