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This package is a wrapper around theVoteSmartAPI written by your friendlyneighborhood progressive tech organization, 🌟DeckTechnologies 🌟. Feel free to use this packagein any way you like.

VoteSmart provides information on US political candidates’ positions onissues, votes on bills, and ratings by third party organizations, amongother data.

install.packages("votesmart")

Or the development version:

devtools::install_github("decktools/votesmart",build_vignettes=TRUE)

You’ll need a VoteSmart API key in order to use this package. You canregister for onehere.

Store your key in an environment variable namedVOTESMART_API_KEY with

Sys.setenv(VOTESMART_API_KEY = "<your_key>")

You can check that it’s there with

Sys.getenv("VOTESMART_API_KEY")

This package never stores your key in your R session’s globalenvironment.

VoteSmart collects ratings on various issues that Special InterestGroups (SIGs) give to political candidates.

Let’s say we want to know how Elizabeth Warren tends to be rated on afew issues.

library(votesmart)suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(dplyr))conflicted::conflict_prefer("filter","dplyr")#> [conflicted] Will prefer dplyr::filter over any other package.

We’ll first want to know what her VoteSmartcandidate_id is. We cansearch for her usingcandidates_get_by_lastname:

warrens<-  candidates_get_by_lastname("warren",election_years=2012  )#> Requesting data for {last_name: warren, election_year: 2012, stage_id: }.knitr::kable(warrens)

Filtering to her first name and taking hercandidate_id, we can nowgrab Warren’s ratings by all SIGs withrating_get_candidate_ratings.

(id<-warrens %>%  filter(first_name=="Elizabeth") %>%  pull(candidate_id))#> [1] "141272"ratings<-  rating_get_candidate_ratings(candidate_ids=id,  )#> Requesting data for {candidate_id: 141272, sig_id: }.knitr::kable(ratings %>% sample_n(3))

And compute on them:

ratings %>%  filter(category_name_1%in%      c("Environment","Fiscally Conservative","Education","Civil Liberties and Civil Rights","Campaign Finance"      )  ) %>%  group_by(category_name_1) %>%  summarise(avg_rating= mean(as.numeric(rating),na.rm=TRUE)  ) %>%  arrange(category_name_1)#> # A tibble: 5 × 2#>   category_name_1                  avg_rating#>   <chr>                                 <dbl>#> 1 Campaign Finance                     100#> 2 Civil Liberties and Civil Rights      86.6#> 3 Education                             89.3#> 4 Environment                           87.2#> 5 Fiscally Conservative                  8.78

For more in-depth examples of how these all fit together, check out thevignette with:

vignette("votesmart")

These functions are named after thesnake_cased version of the APIendpoints.

If you see an endpoint you want to be made available in this packagethat isn’t yet, feel free to submit anissue or apullrequest!

candidates_get_by_lastname

Get a dataframe of candidates given a vector oflast_names,election_years (optional, defaulting to current year), andstage_ids(optional)

candidates_get_by_levenshtein

Get a dataframe of fuzzy-matched candidates given a vector oflast_names,election_years (optional), andstage_ids (optional)

candidates_get_by_office_state

Get a dataframe of candidates by the state in which they ran for officegiven a vector ofstate_ids (optional),office_ids, andelection_years (optional)

election_get_election_by_year_state

Get a dataframe of election ids and their attributes given a vector ofyears andstate_ids (optional)

measure_get_measures

Get a dataframe of ballot measure attributes given ameasure_id

measure_get_measures_by_year_state

Get a dataframe of ballot measure ids and their attributes given avector ofyears andstate_ids (optional)

office_get_levels

Get the VoteSmartoffice_level_ids and their associated names(federal, state, local)

office_get_offices_by_level

Getoffice_ids and their associated names (e.g. "President") for agivenoffice_level_id

rating_get_candidate_ratings

Get SIG (Special Interest Group) ratings for candidates given acandidate_id and asig_id (optional)

rating_get_categories

Get ratingcategory_ids and their associatednames(e.g. "Abortion","Environment") given a vector ofstate_ids(optional)

rating_get_sig

Get information about a vector of SIGs (Special Interest Groups) given asig_id

rating_get_sig_list

Get a dataframe of SIG (Special Interest Group) given a ratingcategory_id and astate_id (optional)

votes_get_by_official

Get a dataframe of the way officials have voted on bills given acandidate_id, anoffice_id (optional), acategory_id (optional)and ayear the vote occurred (optional)

Only a subset of all of the VoteSmart endpoints have yet been madeavailable through this package.

You can see a full dataframe of the VoteSmart endpoints and theirassociated arguments with

data("endpoint_input_mapping")

or

data("endpoint_input_mapping_nested")

• This package currently contains no rate limiting infrastructure asthere is very little information about what rate limits VoteSmartimposes, if any

• The VoteSmart API does not allow for bulk requests, i.e. a singlerequest can only contain one value for each parameter

  • The functions in this package allow multiple inputs to be specifiedfor each argument, but requests are sent one at a time for eachcombination of inputs

Feel free to reach out in theIssues with any bugs orfeature requests! 💫