In this vignette we use twfy to take a look at the MP for Keighley, West Yorkshire.
library(twfy)We can get its detailed by name or by any postcode
keighley <- getConstituency("Keighley")Who is the current MP? This time we’ll use the postcode lookup
mp <- getMP(postcode="BD21 2DH")Keighley’s MP is
mp$full_name## [1] "John Grogan"He’s a member of the Labour Party
mp$party## [1] "Labour"and since we’re in England he’s in the House of Commons, represented as 1.
mp$house## [1] "1"We can find him with two identifiers, the identifier for his current term in office
mp$member_id## [1] "41872"but more lastingly by his person id
mp$person_id## [1] "10248"With person_id we can get the details of all of his spells in the House of Commons like this
mp_per <- getPerson(mp$person_id)Now, what’s he been talking about in Parliamentary debates?
mp_talk <- getDebates(person=mp$person_id)Debate results are fairly structured objects
names(mp_talk)## [1] "info" "searchdescription" "rows"names(mp_talk$info) # what we've got to work with## [1] "s" "results_per_page" "page"
## [4] "first_result" "total_results" "spelling_correction"the output is paged, so there are
mp_talk$info$total_results## [1] 519entries, of which we are seeing from
mp_talk$info$results_per_page## [1] 20counting from
mp_talk$info$first_result## [1] 1to get the second page, we’d call getDebates again specifying page=2.
Let’s take a look at the first recorded entry
first_entry <- mp_talk$rows[1,]
first_entry$hdate## [1] "2010-04-08"clarifying an important issue
first_entry$body## [1] "<p pid=\"b.1177.6/1\">Will the Secretary of State say a few words about the impact of the proposed level of feed-in tariffs on the development of anaerobic digestion plants such as the proposed Selby renewable energy plant, which is set to power 10,000 homes in the town?</p>"The speaker field embeds a data.frame with the speaker’s details, from which we note that he was not representing Keighley at that time but rather
first_entry$speaker$constituency## [1] "Selby"