This tutorial is largely based on the manifestoR vignette.
Installing and loading manifestoR
In order to make use of the manifestoR package, you need to have a working installation of R installed on your computer. R is an open-source statistic and programming software and can be downloaded for free. We recommend the use of RStudio as an integrated development environment, but the tutorial should also work with just R installed on your computer. To install the manifestoR-package, type the following commands into the console window:
To make use of manifestoR, you need to load the package using the
library-function.
You need to load the package again whenever you restart your R session, but you do not need to install it again. Although you can type all commands in the R console and use R interactively, we recommend to write all code in an .R file to make your work more easily reproducible.
Sidenote: As we make use of some dplyr functions during this tutorial we will also have to load the dplyr package:
Connecting to the Manifesto Project Database API
To access the Manifesto Project Data or data in the Manifesto Corpus with manifestoR, an account for the Manifesto Project webpage with an API key is required. If you do not yet have an account, you can create one at https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/signup. If you have an account, you can create and download the API key on your profile page.
For every R session using manifestoR and connecting to the Manifesto
API, you need to set the API key in your work environment. This can be
done by passing either a key or the name of a file containing the key to
manifestoR’s mp_setapikey() function (see documentation
?mp_setapikey for details). Thus, your R script using
manifestoR usually will start like this:
This R code presumes that you have stored and downloaded the API key
in a file named manifesto_apikey.txt in your current R
working directory.
Note that it is a security risk to store the API key file or a script containing the key in public repositories such as github.
All the following commands will only work if you have set your apikey as described above.
Downloading the Manifesto Project Dataset
Let’s first learn how to download the Manifesto
Project Dataset with manifestoR. You can download the Manifesto
Project Dataset (MPDS) with the function
mp_maindataset().
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API...
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1## [1] "country" "countryname" "oecdmember" "eumember"
## [5] "edate" "date" "party" "partyname"
## [9] "partyabbrev" "parfam" "candidatename" "coderid"
## [13] "manual" "coderyear" "testresult" "testeditsim"
## [17] "pervote" "voteest" "presvote" "absseat"
## [21] "totseats" "progtype" "datasetorigin" "corpusversion"
## [25] "total" "peruncod" "per101" "per102"
## [29] "per103" "per104" "per105" "per106"
## [33] "per107" "per108" "per109" "per110"
## [37] "per201" "per202" "per203" "per204"
## [41] "per301" "per302" "per303" "per304"
## [45] "per305" "per401" "per402" "per403"
## [49] "per404" "per405" "per406" "per407"
## [53] "per408" "per409" "per410" "per411"
## [57] "per412" "per413" "per414" "per415"
## [61] "per416" "per501" "per502" "per503"
## [65] "per504" "per505" "per506" "per507"
## [69] "per601" "per602" "per603" "per604"
## [73] "per605" "per606" "per607" "per608"
## [77] "per701" "per702" "per703" "per704"
## [81] "per705" "per706" "per1011" "per1012"
## [85] "per1013" "per1014" "per1015" "per1016"
## [89] "per1021" "per1022" "per1023" "per1024"
## [93] "per1025" "per1026" "per1031" "per1032"
## [97] "per1033" "per2021" "per2022" "per2023"
## [101] "per2031" "per2032" "per2033" "per2041"
## [105] "per3011" "per3051" "per3052" "per3053"
## [109] "per3054" "per3055" "per4011" "per4012"
## [113] "per4013" "per4014" "per4121" "per4122"
## [117] "per4123" "per4124" "per4131" "per4132"
## [121] "per5021" "per5031" "per5041" "per5061"
## [125] "per6011" "per6012" "per6013" "per6014"
## [129] "per6061" "per6071" "per6072" "per6081"
## [133] "per7051" "per7052" "per7061" "per7062"
## [137] "per103_1" "per103_2" "per201_1" "per201_2"
## [141] "per202_1" "per202_2" "per202_3" "per202_4"
## [145] "per305_1" "per305_2" "per305_3" "per305_4"
## [149] "per305_5" "per305_6" "per416_1" "per416_2"
## [153] "per601_1" "per601_2" "per602_1" "per602_2"
## [157] "per605_1" "per605_2" "per606_1" "per606_2"
## [161] "per607_1" "per607_2" "per607_3" "per608_1"
## [165] "per608_2" "per608_3" "per703_1" "per703_2"
## [169] "rile" "planeco" "markeco" "welfare"
## [173] "intpeace" "datasetversion" "id_perm"The dataset is returned as a data.frame (to be precise as a tibble - the tidyverse version
of a data.frame), therefore the names function returns the
variable names of the data frame. By default the most recent version of
the dataset is returned, but you can also access older versions. To get
a list of all versions of the main dataset, type:
## datasets.id datasets.name
## 1 MPDS2012a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2012a)
## 2 MPDS2012b Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2012b)
## 3 MPDS2013a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2013a)
## 4 MPDS2013b Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2013b)
## 5 MPDS2014a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2014a)
## 6 MPDS2014b Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2014b)
## 7 MPDS2015a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2015a)
## 8 MPDS2016a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2016a)
## 9 MPDS2016b Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2016b)
## 10 MPDS2017a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2017a)
## 11 MPDS2017b Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2017b)
## 12 MPDS2018a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2018a)
## 13 MPDS2018b Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2018b)
## 14 MPDS2019a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2019a)
## 15 MPDS2019b Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2019b)
## 16 MPDS2020a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2020a)
## 17 MPDS2020b Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2020b)
## 18 MPDS2021a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2021a)
## 19 MPDS2022a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2022a)
## 20 MPDS2023a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2023a)
## 21 MPDS2024a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2024a)
## 22 MPDS2025a Manifesto Project Dataset (version 2025a)To query a specific version of the main dataset, use the dataset.id listed in the output of coreversions. For example, to get the Manifesto Project Dataset version 2015a, type:
Even if you want to use the current version of the dataset, it is good practice to specifically query this version to ensure that you always get the same dataset even if you later run your script again.
Until 2022 the South American data was published in a separate
dataset. You can access the respective versions of the Manifesto Project
South America Dataset using the function
mp_southamerica_dataset() that works analogously to
mp_maindataset().
Downloading documents from the Manifesto Corpus
Check the availability of documents
Before downloading documents, the function
mp_availability let’s you check which documents are
available in the Manifesto Corpus. The following command summarizes the
availability of documents. If not assigned to an object, it prints a
summary report of the Manifesto Corpus. The argument TRUE
here indicates that it checks whether there is a document available for
each case of the Manifesto Project Dataset.
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1## Queried for
## 5285
## Corpus Version
## 2025-1
## Documents found
## 3341 (63.217%)
## Coded Documents found
## 2157 (40.814%)
## Originals found
## 3639 (68.855%)
## English Translations found
## 1461 (27.644%)
## Languages
## 42 (swedish norwegian danish finnish icelandic french dutch german english italian spanish catalan galician greek portuguese maltese japanese hebrew turkish albanian armenian bosnian bosnian-cyrillic serbian-cyrillic serbian-latin croatian bulgarian czech estonian georgian hungarian latvian lithuanian macedonian romanian montenegrin polish russian slovak slovenian ukrainian korean)Instead of indicating TRUE, you can also indicate a
logical expression using variables from the Manifesto Project Dataset
which serves as a reference of cases. The following command checks for
the availability of documents for all Belgium manifestos covered by the
Manifesto Project Dataset.
## Queried for Corpus Version
## 194 2025-1
## Documents found Coded Documents found
## 166 (85.567%) 48 (24.742%)
## Originals found English Translations found
## 134 (69.072%) 48 (24.742%)
## Languages
## 2 (french dutch)## [1] "party" "date" "manifestos" "originals"
## [5] "annotations" "translation_en" "language"available_docs is a data.frame where can easily be filtered, eg for a specific language. To check for the availability of Flemish (here labelled as “dutch”) documents for Belgium elections since 2010 covered in the dataset you could for example do the following:
belgium_2010 <- mp_availability(countryname == "Belgium" & date > 201000)
filter(belgium_2010, language == "dutch")## Queried for Corpus Version
## 35 2025-1
## Documents found Coded Documents found
## 21 (60%) 21 (60%)
## Originals found English Translations found
## 21 (60%) 21 (60%)
## Languages
## 1 (dutch)To get all English-language documents that come along with annotations, you would do the following
Downloading documents
(Bulk-)Downloading documents from the Manifesto Corpus works via the
function mp_corpus(...). This function understands
different inputs.
- You can download election programmes on an individual basis by
listing combinations of party ids and election dates in a
data.frameand passing it tomp_corpus(...):
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1## <<ManifestoCorpus>>
## Metadata: corpus specific: 0, document level (indexed): 0
## Content: documents: 1The party ids (41220 and 41320 in the example) are the ids as in the Manifesto Project’s main dataset. They can be found in the current dataset documentation at https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/datasets or in the main dataset.
Note that we received only 1 document, while querying for two. This is because the party with the id 41220 (KPD) did not run for elections in September 2009.
- Instead of typing all these combinations by hand, one can also do
this easier:
mp_availabilityreturns a data frame in the same format as thewanteddata frame above that is used to query the corpus. So, to get a corpus with all english-language annotated documents, you could just pass the objectenglish_annotatedsaved above to themp_corpusfunction:
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1## <<ManifestoCorpus>>
## Metadata: corpus specific: 0, document level (indexed): 0
## Content: documents: 247mp_corpuscan be called with a logical expression specifying the subset of the Manifesto Corpus that you want to download:
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1## Your query resulted in 22 requested document items containing corpus metadata. Of these items 1 could not be retrieved (reasons: 1 having no machine-readable texts).## <<ManifestoCorpus>>
## Metadata: corpus specific: 0, document level (indexed): 0
## Content: documents: 21This queries for all documents in the Manifesto Corpus for Austrian parties published after or in the the year 2001. (The format of the date variable in the Manifesto Project Dataset is YYYYMM).
The variable names in the logical expression used for querying the
corpus database (countryname and date in the
example above) can be any column names from the Manifesto Project’s Main
Dataset or your current R environment. The Main Dataset itself is
available in manifestoR via the funcion. The following command queries
all documents with a “rile”
score higher than 60:
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1## Your query resulted in 34 requested document items containing corpus metadata. Of these items 25 could not be retrieved (reasons: 4 having no real documents coded (see progtype 3 and 99), 21 having no machine-readable texts).## <<ManifestoCorpus>>
## Metadata: corpus specific: 0, document level (indexed): 0
## Content: documents: 9A convenient way to download the whole Manifesto Corpus is to type
mp_corpus(TRUE). However, please have in mind that this
might take a while to process and download. In most cases, it is
sufficient to download a subset of the Manifesto Corpus.
The ManifestoCorpus object
mp_corpus returns a ManifestoCorpus object,
a subclass of Corpus as defined in the natural language
processing package tm (Feinerer & Hornik 2015).
Following tms logic, a ManifestoCorpus
consists of ManifestoDocuments. Documents in corpus can be
indexed via their manifesto_id (consisting of the CMP party
code, an underscore, and either the election year, if unambigous, or the
election year and month) or via their position in the corpus. For both,
corpus and documents, tm provides accessor functions to the
corpus and documents content and metadata:
## [1] "“Wir können heute die Existenzgrundlagen"
## [2] "künftiger Generationen zerstören."
## [3] "Oder sie sichern.”"
## [4] "Dr. Eva Glawischnig"
## [5] "Österreich braucht jetzt Weitblick."
## [6] "Nachhaltigkeit für zukünftige Generationen"## [1] "“Wir können heute die Existenzgrundlagen"
## [2] "künftiger Generationen zerstören."
## [3] "Oder sie sichern.”"
## [4] "Dr. Eva Glawischnig"
## [5] "Österreich braucht jetzt Weitblick."
## [6] "Nachhaltigkeit für zukünftige Generationen"## manifesto_id : 42110_200211
## party : 42110
## date : 200211
## language : german
## source : MARPOR
## has_eu_code : FALSE
## is_primary_doc : TRUE
## may_contradict_core_dataset: FALSE
## md5sum_text : 4e1877c110c3d01db9eaf864310cc0b0
## url_original : NA
## md5sum_original : NA
## annotations : TRUE
## handbook : 3
## is_copy_of : NA
## title : Österreich braucht jetzt die Grünen. Das Wahlprogramm
## translation_en : TRUE
## id : 42110_200211Processing and analysing the corpus documents
As in tm, the textual content of a document is returned
by the function content. In the documents with annotations,
the text is stored as a character vector where each element is one
quasi-sentence. For example the extract below are the first four
quasi-sentences from the Austrian Green Party’s manifesto from the 2006
election.
## [1] "character"## [1] "1 Lebensqualität"
## [2] "1.1 Grüne Energiewende"
## [3] "Lebensqualität bedeutet in einer unversehrten Umwelt zu leben."
## [4] "Die Verantwortung dafür liegt bei uns: Wir alle gestalten Umwelt."In documents with no annotations, the text is stored as a single very long character string. The following shows an extract of the German SPD manifesto from 1994 election.
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1## [1] " an diesen Prozessen stärker beteiligt werden, daß sie mehr mitbestimmen können. Deshalb werden wir das Betriebsverfassungs- und Personalvertretungsrecht dort weiterentwickeln, wo neue Arbeitsorganisationen und neue Produktions- und Informationstechnologien dies erfordern. Wir wollen die Unternehmensmitbestimmung der Arbeitnehmer, ihrer Interessenvertreter und Gewerkschaften sichern und weiterentwickeln. Mitbestimmungsrechte dürfen durch Unternehmensspaltungen und Konzernstrukturen oder durch Verlagerungen von Unternehmenszentralen ins Ausland nicht eingeschränkt werden. Um die Aushöhlung der Mitbestimmung"Working with the CMP codings
The central way for accessing the CMP codings is the accessor method
codes(...). It can be called on
ManifestoDocuments and ManifestoCorpuss and
returns a vector of the CMP codings attached to the quasi-sentences of
the document/corpus in a row:
## [1] NA NA "501" "606" "501" "501" "501" "416" "416" "412" "503" "411"
## [13] "501" "416" NA## [1] "305" "305" "305" NA NA NA "601" "416" "416" "107" "107" "107"
## [13] "416" "416" "416"Thus you can for example use R’s functionality to count the codes or select quasi- sentences (units of texts) based on their code:
##
## 104 105 106 107 108 109 201 202 203 303 305 401 402 403 408 409 411 412 413 416
## 3 9 2 52 36 11 36 17 1 3 1 2 6 20 1 1 38 17 1 13
## 501 502 503 504 506 601 604 605 606 607 608 701 703 704 706
## 62 48 83 24 46 14 20 9 10 15 5 33 13 9 32## [1] 115## [1] 0.1489637The CMP coding scheme can be found in the online documentation of the
Manifesto Project dataset at https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/coding_schemes/1.
Obviously, codes() only works on documents that are
digitally annotated (annotations==TRUE).
Using the document metadata
Each document in the Manifesto Corpus has meta information about
itself attached. They can be accessed via the function
meta:
## manifesto_id : 42110_200610
## party : 42110
## date : 200610
## language : german
## source : MARPOR
## has_eu_code : FALSE
## is_primary_doc : TRUE
## may_contradict_core_dataset: FALSE
## md5sum_text : b90378f0c6fca51b464bbe8cd2c96990
## url_original : /down/originals/42110_2006.pdf
## md5sum_original : 8fd5726c6363864c3ace6e2d497d647e
## annotations : TRUE
## handbook : 3
## is_copy_of : NA
## title : Zeit für Grün. Das Grüne Programm
## translation_en : TRUE
## id : 42110_200610It is possible to access and also modify specific metadata entries:
## [1] 42110## manifesto_id : 42110_200610
## party : 42110
## date : 200610
## language : german
## source : MARPOR
## has_eu_code : FALSE
## is_primary_doc : TRUE
## may_contradict_core_dataset: FALSE
## md5sum_text : b90378f0c6fca51b464bbe8cd2c96990
## url_original : /down/originals/42110_2006.pdf
## md5sum_original : 8fd5726c6363864c3ace6e2d497d647e
## annotations : TRUE
## handbook : 3
## is_copy_of : NA
## title : Zeit für Grün. Das Grüne Programm
## translation_en : TRUE
## id : 42110_200610
## manual_edits : TRUEDocument metadata can also be bulk-downloaded with the function
mp_metadata, taking the same set of parameters as
mp_corpus:
## # A tibble: 6 × 16
## party date language source has_eu_code is_primary_doc may_contradict_core_…¹
## <dbl> <dbl> <chr> <chr> <lgl> <lgl> <lgl>
## 1 33220 197706 <NA> <NA> FALSE NA NA
## 2 33320 197706 spanish CEMP FALSE TRUE FALSE
## 3 33430 197706 spanish CEMP FALSE TRUE FALSE
## 4 33610 197706 <NA> <NA> FALSE NA NA
## 5 33901 197706 <NA> <NA> FALSE NA NA
## 6 33902 197706 <NA> <NA> FALSE NA NA
## # ℹ abbreviated name: ¹may_contradict_core_dataset
## # ℹ 9 more variables: manifesto_id <chr>, md5sum_text <chr>,
## # url_original <chr>, md5sum_original <chr>, annotations <lgl>,
## # handbook <chr>, is_copy_of <chr>, title <chr>, translation_en <lgl>The field …
- …
partycontains the party id from the Manifesto Project Dataset. - …
datecontains the month of the election in the same format as in the Manifesto Project Dataset (YYYYMM) - …
languagespecifies the language of the document as a word. - …
is_primary_docis FALSE only in cases where for a single party and election date multiple manifestos are available and this is the document not used for coding by the Manifesto Project. - …
may_contradict_core_datasetis TRUE for documents where the CMP codings in the corpus documents might be inconsistent with the coding aggregates in the Manifesto Project’s Main Dataset. This applies to manifestos which have been either recoded after they entered the dataset or cases where the dataset entries are derived from hand-written coding sheets used prior to the digitalization of the Manifesto Project’s data workflow, but the documents were digitalized and added to the Manifesto Corpus afterwards. - …
annotationsis TRUE whenenver there are CMP codings available for the document. - …
has_eu_codemarks document in which the additional coding layereu_codeis present. These codes have been assigned to quasi-sentences by CMP coders additionally to the main CMP code to indicate policy statements that should or should not be implemented on the level of the European union. - …
handbookindicates the version of the coding instructions that was used to annotate the document. See this website for more information on the (different versions of) coding instructions. - …
is_copy_ofIn a few cases, we copy manifestos to use them for more than one party-date combination (eg. in case of some alliances). In such cases, this field indicates the manifesto-id of the original document. When doing computerized text analysis, you might often want to exclude these cases otherwise you will deal with duplicate documents. - …
titleis the title of the document.
The other metadata entries have primarily technical functions for
communication between the manifestoR package and the online
database.
Working with additional layers of codings
Besides the main layer of CMP codings, you can create, store and
access additional layers of codings in ManifestoDocuments
by passing a name of the coding layer as additional argument to the
function codes():
## assigning a dummy code of alternating As and Bs
codes(doc, "my_code") <- rep_len(c("A", "B"), length.out = length(doc))
head(codes(doc, "my_code"))## [1] "A" "B" "A" "B" "A" "B"You can view the names of the coding layers stored in a
ManifestoDocument with the function
code_layers():
## [1] "cmp_code" "eu_code" "my_code"Note that certain documents downloaded from the Manifesto Corpus
Database already have a second layer of codes named
eu_code. These are codes that have been assigned to
quasi-sentences by CMP coders additionally to the main CMP code to
indicate policy statements that should or should not be implemented on
the level of the European union. The documents that were coded in this
way are marked in the corpus’ metadata with the flag
has_eu_code (see below Using the document metadata).
Note that, since these codes also have been used for computing the
per and rile variables in the Manifesto
Project Main Dataset, they are also used in manifestoRs
count_codes and rile functions (see below Scaling texts) if the respective metadata flag
is present.
Text mining tools
Since the Manifesto Corpus uses the infrastructure of the
tm package (Feinerer & Hornik 2015), all of
tms filtering and transformation functionality can be
applied directly to the downloaded ManifestoCorpus.
For example, standard natural language processors are available to clean the corpus:
## [1] "1. SONNE STATT ÖL: WIR HELFEN BEIM SPAREN"
## [2] "Der Umstieg hat begonnen."
## [3] "Die Menschen in Österreich fahren weniger Auto"
## [4] "und mehr mit dem öffentlichen Verkehr"
## [5] "und dem Rad."
## [6] "Sie sanieren Häuser und Wohnungen"corpus_cleaned <- tm_map(my_corpus, tm::removePunctuation)
corpus_nostop <- tm_map(corpus_cleaned, tm::removeWords, tm::stopwords("german"))
head(content(corpus_nostop[["42110_200809"]]))## [1] "1 SONNE STATT ÖL WIR HELFEN BEIM SPAREN"
## [2] "Der Umstieg begonnen"
## [3] "Die Menschen Österreich fahren weniger Auto"
## [4] " mehr öffentlichen Verkehr"
## [5] " Rad"
## [6] "Sie sanieren Häuser Wohnungen"So is analysis in form of term document matrices:
## <<TermDocumentMatrix (terms: 3, documents: 21)>>
## Non-/sparse entries: 52/11
## Sparsity : 17%
## Maximal term length: 8
## Weighting : term frequency (tf)
## Sample :
## Docs
## Terms 42110_200211 42110_201309 42320_200211 42320_200809 42320_201309
## familie 2 8 2 2 7
## menschen 65 144 78 50 53
## wahl 2 9 2 0 0
## Docs
## Terms 42420_200211 42520_200211 42520_200610 42520_201309 42951_201309
## familie 17 19 20 20 11
## menschen 38 47 49 72 102
## wahl 1 2 0 2 12## $stadt
## erfordert
## 0.97For more information about the functionality provided by the
tm, please refer to its documentation.
Selecting relevant parts of text
For applications in which not the entire text of a document is of
interest, but rather a subset of the quasi-sentences matching certain
criteria, manifestoR provides a function
subset(...) working just like R’s internal
subset function.
It can, for example, be used to filter quasi-sentences based on codes or the text:
# subsetting based on codes (as example above)
doc_subcodes <- subset(doc, codes(doc) %in% c(202, 503, 607))
length(doc_subcodes)## [1] 115# subsetting based on text
doc_subtext <- subset(doc, grepl("Demokratie", content(doc)))
head(content(doc_subtext), n = 3)## [1] "Eine Demokratie benötigt auch die Unterstützung von Forschung jenseits wirtschaftlicher Interessen."
## [2] "In einer Demokratie sollen all jene wählen dürfen, die von den politischen Entscheidungen betroffen sind."
## [3] "Demokratie braucht die Teilhabe der BürgerInnen."## [1] "506" "202" "202" "201" "108" NA "202" "107"Via tm_map the filtering operations can also be applied
to an entire corpus:
corp_sub <- tm_map(my_corpus, function(doc) {
subset(doc, codes(doc) %in% c(202, 503, 607))
})
head(content(corp_sub[[3]]))## [1] "Darüber hinaus kamen, über das gesamte Erwerbsleben gerechnet, nur rund ein Drittel der Arbeitnehmer in den Genuss einer Abfertigung."
## [2] "Die damalige sozialistisch dominierte Koalition hat Arbeitsplätze und Schutz für sozial Bedürftige versprochen, aber tatsächlich steigende Arbeitslosenzahlen hingenommen, soziale Notlagen zunehmend verschärft und mehr Menschen in Armut gedrängt."
## [3] "Verbesserung der Rechtsdurchsetzung in arbeits- und sozialgerichtlichen Verfahren."
## [4] "Ausbau des Service- und Dienstleistungscharakters der Arbeitsinspektorate."
## [5] "hat sich die Einkommensschere zwischen Männern und Frauen immer mehr geöffnet."
## [6] "Ein besonderes Problem bestand darin, dass die Asylverfahren sich oft mehrere Jahre erstreckten."## [1] "503" "202" "202" "503" "503" "503"For convenience, it is also possible to filter quasi-sentences with
specific codes directly when downloading a corpus. For this, the
additional argument codefilter with a list of CMP codes of
interest is passed to mp_corpus:
## Your query resulted in 125 requested document items containing corpus metadata. Of these items 81 could not be retrieved (reasons: 1 having no real documents coded (see progtype 3 and 99), 24 having no machine-readable texts, 56 having no machine-readable annotations).## [1] "In the important area of defense alone, our defense white paper has made the greatest ever additional provision for the future defense needs of Australia of any government in more than a quarter of a century."
## [2] "Over the next ten years we will invest an additional $32 billion in the defense of Australia."
## [3] "And how proud I am to say to you that when we came into government in March of 1996 and we found not withstanding what Mr."
## [4] "Beazley had told us during the election campaign that our budget was $10."
## [5] "5 billion in deficit, that we’d accumulated as a nation $96 billion of federal government debt, the one restriction I put on Peter Costello and John Fahey in getting the budget in shape was you will not cut any money out of defense."
## [6] "And not only didn’t we cut any money out of defense we in fact increased defense expenditure, and just as well because in that five and a half year period we’ve had the demands of East Timor, of Bougainville, and now the commitment to the war against terrorism which is as much our war and our fight and our struggle as it is for the people of the United States."## [1] "104" "104" "104" "104" "104" "104"Viewing original documents
Apart from the machine-readable, annotated documents, the Manifesto
Corpus also contains original layouted election programmes in PDF
format. If available, they can be viewed via the function
mp_view_originals(...), which takes exactly the format of
arguments as mp_corpus(...) (see above), e.g.:
The original documents are shown in you system’s web browser. All
URLs opened by this function refer only to the Manifesto Project’s
Website. If you want to open more than 5 PDF documents at once, you have
to specify the maximum number of URLs allows to be opened manually via
the parameter maxn. Since opening URLs in an external
browser costs computing resources on your local machine, make sure to
use only values for maxn that do not slow down or make your
computer unresponsive.
Efficiency and reproducibility: caching and versioning
To save time and network traffic, manifestoR caches all
downloaded data and documents in your computer’s working memory and
connects to the online database only when data is required that has not
been downloaded before.
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1Note that in the second query no message informing about the connection to the Manifesto Project’s Database is printed, since no data is actually downloaded.
This mechanism also ensures reproducibility of your scripts, analyses and results: executing your code again will yield the same results, even if the Manifesto Project’s Database is updated in the meantime. Since the cache is only stored in the working memory, however, in order to ensure reproducibility across R sessions, it is advisable to save the cache to the hard drive at the end of analyses and load it in the beginning:
mp_save_cache(file = "manifesto_cache.RData")
## ... start new R session ... then:
library(manifestoR)
mp_setapikey("manifesto_apikey.txt")
mp_load_cache(file = "manifesto_cache.RData")This way manifestoR always works with the same snapshot
of the Manifesto Project Database and Corpus, saves a lot of unnecessary
online traffic and also enables you to continue with your analyses
offline.
Each snapshot of the Manifesto Corpus is identified via a version number, which is stored in the cache together with the data and can be accessed via
## [1] "2025-1"When collaborating on a project with other researchers, it is
advisable to use the same corpus version for reproducibility of the
results. manifestoR can be set to use a specific version
with the functions
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2015-3
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2015-3## 1 documents updatedIn order to guarantee reproducibility of published work, please also mention the corpus version id used for the reported analyses in the publication.
For updating locally cached data to the most recent version of the
Manifesto Project Corpus, manifestoR provides two
functions:
## $update_available
## [1] TRUE
##
## $versionid
## [1] "2025-1"## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1
## Connecting to Manifesto Project DB API... corpus version: 2025-1## 1 documents updated## [1] "2025-1"## $update_available
## [1] FALSE
##
## $versionid
## [1] "2025-1"For more detailed information on the caching mechanism and on how to
use and load specific snapshots of the Manifesto Corpus, refer to the R
documentations of the functions mentioned here as well
mp_use_corpus_version, mp_corpusversions,
mp_which_corpus_version.
Exporting documents
If required ManifestoCorpus as well as
ManifestoDocument objects can be converted to R’s internal
data.frame format and processed further:
doc_df <- as.data.frame(doc)
head(within(doc_df, {
## for pretty printing
text <- paste0(substr(text, 1, 60), "...")
}))## text cmp_code
## 1 1 Lebensqualität... <NA>
## 2 1.1 Grüne Energiewende... <NA>
## 3 Lebensqualität bedeutet in einer unversehrten Umwelt zu lebe... 501
## 4 Die Verantwortung dafür liegt bei uns: Wir alle gestalten Um... 606
## 5 Ein Umdenken in der Energiepolitik ist eine wesentliche Vora... 501
## 6 Wir Grüne stehen für eine Energiewende hin zu einem Aufbruch... 501
## eu_code my_code pos
## 1 <NA> A 1
## 2 <NA> B 2
## 3 <NA> A 3
## 4 <NA> B 4
## 5 <NA> A 5
## 6 <NA> B 6The function also provides a parameter to include all available metadata in the export:
## [1] "text" "cmp_code"
## [3] "eu_code" "my_code"
## [5] "pos" "manifesto_id"
## [7] "party" "date"
## [9] "language" "source"
## [11] "has_eu_code" "is_primary_doc"
## [13] "may_contradict_core_dataset" "md5sum_text"
## [15] "url_original" "md5sum_original"
## [17] "annotations" "handbook"
## [19] "is_copy_of" "title"
## [21] "translation_en" "id"
## [23] "manual_edits"Note again that also all functionality provided by tm,
such as writeCorpus is available on a
ManifestoCorpus.
Additional Information
When publishing work using the Manifesto Corpus, please make sure to
cite it correctly and to give the identification number of the corpus
version used for your analysis. You can print citation and version
information with the function mp_cite().
For a more detailed reference and complete list of the functions
provided by manifestoR, see the R package reference manual
on CRAN: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/manifestoR/manifestoR.pdf
References
Feinerer, I., & Hornik, K. (2015). Tm: Text Mining Package. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tm/index.html
Session Info
Tested with:
## Warning in system2("quarto", "-V", stdout = TRUE, env = paste0("TMPDIR=", :
## Ausführung von Kommando '"quarto"
## TMPDIR=C:/Users/riethmuell5/AppData/Local/Temp/RtmpuCqzb3/file51447d641a74 -V'
## ergab Status 1## ─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
## setting value
## version R version 4.5.0 (2025-04-11 ucrt)
## date 2025-09-05
## pandoc 3.4 @ C:/Program Files/R-Studio/resources/app/bin/quarto/bin/tools/ (via rmarkdown)
## quarto NA @ C:\\PROGRA~1\\R-Studio\\RESOUR~1\\app\\bin\\quarto\\bin\\quarto.exe
##
## ─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
## package * version date (UTC) lib source
## base64enc 0.1-3 2015-07-28 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.0)
## bookdown 0.44 2025-08-21 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## bslib 0.9.0 2025-01-30 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## cachem 1.1.0 2024-05-16 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## cli 3.6.5 2025-04-23 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## curl 6.4.0 2025-06-22 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## digest 0.6.37 2024-08-19 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## dplyr * 1.1.4 2023-11-17 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## evaluate 1.0.4 2025-06-18 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## fastmap 1.2.0 2024-05-15 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## functional 0.6 2014-07-16 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.0)
## generics 0.1.4 2025-05-09 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## glue 1.8.0 2024-09-30 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## hms 1.1.3 2023-03-21 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## htmltools 0.5.8.1 2024-04-04 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## httr 1.4.7 2023-08-15 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## jquerylib 0.1.4 2021-04-26 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## jsonlite 2.0.0 2025-03-27 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## knitr 1.50 2025-03-16 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## lifecycle 1.0.4 2023-11-07 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## magrittr 2.0.3 2022-03-30 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## manifestoR * 1.6.1 2025-08-29 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## NLP 0.3-2 2024-11-20 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.0)
## pillar 1.11.0 2025-07-04 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## pkgconfig 2.0.3 2019-09-22 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## purrr 1.1.0 2025-07-10 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## R6 2.6.1 2025-02-15 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## Rcpp 1.1.0 2025-07-02 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## readr 2.1.5 2024-01-10 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## rlang 1.1.6 2025-04-11 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## rmarkdown 2.29 2024-11-04 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## rmdformats 1.0.4 2022-05-17 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## rstudioapi 0.17.1 2024-10-22 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## sass 0.4.10 2025-04-11 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## sessioninfo 1.2.3 2025-02-05 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## slam 0.1-55 2024-11-13 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.0)
## tibble 3.3.0 2025-06-08 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## tidyselect 1.2.1 2024-03-11 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## tm 0.7-16 2025-02-19 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## tzdb 0.5.0 2025-03-15 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## utf8 1.2.6 2025-06-08 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## vctrs 0.6.5 2023-12-01 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## withr 3.0.2 2024-10-28 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## xfun 0.52 2025-04-02 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## xml2 1.3.8 2025-03-14 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.1)
## yaml 2.3.10 2024-07-26 [NA] CRAN (R 4.5.0)
##
## * ── Packages attached to the search path.
##
## ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────