dutchparl

dutchparl - An R package for the Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset

This package allows users to work easily with the Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset. There are multiple datasets: one on votes and one on parliamentary (written) questions.

Installation

To install this package in R:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("louwerse/dutchparl")

Download data

The data can be downloaded from Harvard Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/dutchparl

You can download the voting data in R and save it to a file in your current working directory (default = “votes.rds”).

You can download the questions data in R and save it to a file in your current working directory (default = “questions.rds”).

Work with the data

Load the package dutchparl. This includes two example objects examplevotes and examplequestions, which can be used to demonstrate how the package works. The fulldataset is not included with the package, due to its size (see above for downloading).

library("dutchparl")
data = examplevotes
summary(data)
#> Number of votes in dataset:  61 
#> Category count: 
#> 
#>        Cultuur en recreatie                    Economie 
#>                           5                          19 
#>                   Financiën              Internationaal 
#>                           5                           2 
#>            Natuur en milieu     Onderwijs en wetenschap 
#>                          21                          47 
#> Openbare orde en veiligheid                       Recht 
#>                           1                          13 
#>           Sociale zekerheid                     Verkeer 
#>                           5                          10 
#>                        Werk          Zorg en gezondheid 
#>                          16                          12 
#> Parties appearing at least  61  times in the dataset:
#>  [1] "CDA"     "CU"      "D66"     "GL"      "PvdA"    "PvdD"    "PVV"    
#>  [8] "SGP"     "SP"      "Verdonk" "VVD"

You can open the full version of the data using:

votes = loadRDS("votes.rds") # Use name of relevant datafile

Available functions can be obtained via:

help(package="dutchparl")