claudiacerqn / cepesp-r

cepespR

CepespR is a simple package designed to assist users to access the API to Cepespdata, which facilitates rapid, cleaned, organized and documented access to the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral's data on elections in Brazil from 1998 to 2016.

About the CEPESPdata internal API

This R project comunicates with our CEPESPdata API. All the data within this application was extracted from the official TSE repository. After the extraction, the data files were post-processed and organized using HiveQL and Pandas (Python library). There is also an internal cache to minimize the response time of all pre-made requests.

Installation

To install cepesp-R from its Github repository, open R/RStudio and type the following:

if (!require("devtools")) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("Cepesp-Fgv/cepesp-r")
library(cepespR)

Core Functionality

After loading the cepesp-R package into your R session there are four functions which retrieve alternative slices of the processed TSE data. Each which will return a data.frame of the requested election details. The four functions are:

1. votes - Details about the number of votes won by each candidate in a specific election. Just specify the position and year of the electoral contest you want data for, and the regional level at which you would like votes to be aggregated. For example, should Presidential election results be returned as national totals for all of Brazil, or separately for each municipality?

votes(year=2014, position="President", regional_aggregation="Municipality")

2. candidates - Details about the characteristics of individual candidates competing in an election. Just specify the position and year for which you want data.

candidates(year=2014, position="President")

3. coalitions - Details about the parties that constitute each coalition that competed in each election. Just specify the position and year for which you want data.

coalitions(year=2014, position="President")

4. cepespdata - The most comprehensive function which merges data on election results, candidates and coalitions to enable more complex analysis. However, the merges performed here remain imperfect due to errors in the underlying TSE data and so this function should be treated as beta and used with caution. Specify the position and year for which you want data, the regional aggregation at which votes should be summed, and the political aggregation at which votes should be disaggregated - by individual candidates, parties, coalitions, or as totals for each electoral unit.

cepespdata(year=2014, position="President", regional_aggregation="Municipality", political_aggregation="Candidate")

The structure of the resulting data.frame has one row for each unit of regional aggregation and for each unit of political aggregation (for example, for each candidate in each municipality or each party in each state).

New Functions

Aiming for readability, the functions were renamed as follows.

old version	newer version
cepespdata	get_elections
votos	get_votos
candidates	get_candidates
coalitions	get_coalitions

They have the same functionality of their old versions, with one small difference. The get_* functions dont provide default values for year and position.

Parameters

The table below highlights the available options for each required parameter:

year	position	regional_aggregation	political_aggregation
1998	Councillor	Brazil	Candidate
2000	Mayor	Macro	Party
2002	State Deputy	State	Coalition
2004	Federal Deputy	Meso	Consolidated
2006	Senator	Micro
2008	Governor	Municipality
2010	President	Municipality-Zone
2012		Zone
2014		Electoral Section
2016

The same parameters can also be entered in Portuguese:

year	position	regional_aggregation	political_aggregation
1998	Vereador	Brasil	Candidato
2000	Prefeito	Macro	Partido
2002	Deputado Estadual	Estado	Coligacao
2004	Deputado Federal	Meso	Consolidado
2006	Senador	Micro
2008	Governador	Municipio
2010	Presidente	Municipio-Zona
2012		Zona
2014		Votação Seção
2016

Not all electoral contests occur in every year. Feasible requests are:

Ano	Cargos Disponíveis (Descrição)
1998	Presidente, Governador, Senador, Deputado Federal, Deputado Estadual, Deputado Distrital
2000	Prefeito, Vereador
2002	Presidente, Governador, Senador, Deputado Federal, Deputado Estadual, Deputado Distrital
2004	Prefeito, Vereador
2006	Presidente, Governador, Senador, Deputado Federal, Deputado Estadual, Deputado Distrital
2008	Prefeito, Vereador
2010	Presidente, Governador, Senador, Deputado Federal, Deputado Estadual, Deputado Distrital
2012	Prefeito, Vereador
2014	Presidente, Governador, Senador, Deputado Federal, Deputado Estadual, Deputado Distrital
2016	Prefeito, Vereador

Selecting Variables

The default setting is for the function to return all the available variables (columns). To select specific variables and limit the size of the request, you can specify a list of required columns in the columns_list property. The specific columns available depend on the political and regional aggregation selected so you are advised to refer to the API documentation at https://github.com/Cepesp-Fgv/cepesp-rest for further details.

Example:

columns <- list("NUMERO_CANDIDATO","UF","QTDE_VOTOS","COD_MUN_IBGE")

data <- votes(year = 2014, position=1, regional_aggregation="Municipality", columns_list=columns)

Filters

To limit the size of the data returned by the API, the request can be filtered to return data on specific units: By state (using the two-letter abbreviation, eg. "RJ"); by party (using the two-digit official party number, eg. 45), or by candidate number.

For example:

data <- cepespdata(year = 2014, position=1, regional_aggregation=2, political_aggregation=2, state="RS") #To select Rio Grande do Sul 

data <- cepespdata(year = 2014, position=1, regional_aggregation=2, political_aggregation=2, party=13) #To select the PT (=13)

data <- cepespdata(year = 2014, position=1, regional_aggregation=2, political_aggregation=2, candidate=2511) #To select candidate 2511

Important: When requesting data with regional_aggregation=9, the filter state should not be NULL

Cache

Each time a request is made to the cepesp-R API, the specific dataset is constructed and downloaded to your local system. To limit processing and bandwidth utilization, the cepesp-R package includes the option to cache your requests so that they are stored locally and immediately available when that request is repeated.

Note that if you use this feature the app will create a sub-directory /static/cache of your working directory to store the downloaded data. You can manually delete this data to force a new download the next time the same request is made.

data <- votes(year = 2014, position=1, regional_aggregation="Municipality", cached=TRUE)