manifestoR

ManifestoR is a free package for the open source statistical software R. It provides access to coded election programmes from the Manifesto Corpus and to the Manifesto Project's Main Dataset. The Manifesto Corpus contains the collected and annotated election programmes as tibble/data.frame or 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. For information on how to use the manifestoR package check its Vignette: Working with the manifestoR package and for recent changes to the package have a look below.

Functions

  • provides access to the Manifesto Corpus
  • provides access to the English translations in the Manifesto Corpus
  • transforms downloaded documents into corpus format (by tm package)
  • downloads and loads the main dataset in R
  • downloads and loads the parties datasets in R
  • recodes new categories from handbook 5 into handbook 4 categories
  • allows using/browsing the category labels, abbreviations, and descriptions
  • Functions related to the main dataset:
    • rile (Laver & Budge 1992)
    • median voter (Kim & Fording 1998)
    • vanilla scaling (Gabel & Huber 2000)
    • Logration scaling (Lowe et al. 2011)
    • left-right positions (Franzmann & Kaiser 2006)
    • bootstrapped confidence-intervals (Benoit et al. 2009)
    • programmatic clarity (Giebler et al. 2015)
    • effective number of manifesto issues (Greene 2015)
    • two different measures of a party's nicheness (Bischof 2015, Meyer & Miller 2013)
  • Extensions (by others)
    • manifestoEnhanceR (by Hauke Licht): "The manifestoEnhanceR package implements functionality to enhance manifestoR data objects. This includes functions to convert manifestoR data objects to tidy data frames, and a function to convert tidy manifesto data frames to XML documents."

Prerequisites

  • R - Project for Statistical Computing
  • Manifesto Project Database Account (sign up on this webpage)
  • Manifesto Project Database API Key (login to your account, go to your profile page and generate an API key)

Installation

  • install.packages("manifestoR")
  • library(manifestoR)

Documentation

Main Recent Changes

  • Preface: for a more detailed list of changes also check the manifestoR NEWS file.
  • Version 1.6.0 (2024-05-16)
    • added functions to access english translations (mp_corpus(translation = "en"), mp_corpus_df(translation = "en"), mp_corpus_df_bilingual(translation = "en"))
    • added functions to access parties datasets (mp_parties)
    • added function to directly receive the corpus as tibble/data.frame (mp_corpus_df)
    • adaptations for the integration of the south america dataset into the normal dataset
    • some improvements and clarifications
    • multiple bugfixes
  • Data Changes (2023-08-29)
    • to enhance scripts backward compatibility mp_coreversions(kind = "south_america") and mp_maindataset(south_america = TRUE) contain a technical empty dummy dataset MPDSSA9999a as the latest version for the separate South America dataset (which has been directly integrated in the main dataset from version 2023a onwards)
  • Version 1.5.0 (2020-11-29)
    • some refactorings and bugfixes
  • Version 1.4.0 (2020-04-20)
    • added mp_dedication
  • Version 1.3.0 (2018-05-22)
    • added codebook interface (mp_codebook etc.)
    • some smaller changes and bugfixes

Contribute

You would like to contribute to the development of the package, eg. by integrating your preferred scaling procedure, fork manifestoR on github and/or get in touch with us.