Voting Records of Greenlandic and Faroese MPs in Folketinget

This repository contains voting records of Greenlandic and Faroese Members of Parliament (MPs) in Folketing, the Parliament of Denmark. The data in nordatlantisk-ft is openly available to everyone and is intended to support reproducible research.

Repository Structure

The structure of this repository is based on the Open Research Data Template by @maehr, follows the Advanced Structure for Data Analysis of The Turing Way and is organized as follows:

• analysis/: scripts and notebooks used to analyze the data
• assets/: images, background data, literature references etc. used in the README and other documentation
• build/: built files, PDF outputs
• data/: data files
• docs/: documentation for the data and the repository
• src/: source code for the data (e.g., scripts used to collect or process the data)
• test/: tests for the data and source code
• report.qmd: a report with basic insights into the data set

Additionally, there is a Zotero group library with a collection of scientific articles and news reports that are of relevance for studying the Northatlantic MPs' work in Folketinget.

Data Description

This repository contains voting records of Greenlandic and Faroese MPs. Voting records are available online starting October 2004.

For all MPs that were elected in either Greenland or the Faroe Islands since 2004, voting records were retrieved from Folketingets åbne data service (ODA). Because Folketinget seems to have changed their way of record keeping since 2004, the retrieved data had to be processed to consolidate different variables (e.g. extracting ballot results stored as one text string into four numeric variables).

In this repository, the raw data is available as csv files, and processed data is available as rds and csv files including metadata. Also included is the workflow to replicate and update the data set using R.

Descriptions of the workflow and all variables are provided in the codebook. To get an impression of the available data, take a first glance.

Installation

Use the renv package to install all dependencies and set up a reproducible environment within the R project. To see which packages are loaded with renv for the workflow before installing them to the project library, run renv::dependencies().

r renv::restore()

If you are running a recent Mac OS, you will have to install a Fortran compiler manually for compiling the packages before running renv::restore().

Build

This project uses the targets package for managing the workflow of building and updating the data set.

r targets::tar_make()

Running tar_make() will execute the workflow as defined in _targets.R, skipping files ('targets') that have not changed since the last build process.

The targets pipeline is set to check for new voting records every twelve weeks only. To force running the scripts with the most recent data available, remove the cue arguments from the targets ballot_info and raw_voting_records in _targets.R.

You can use the scripts to assemble data sets with voting records of other members of Folketinget as well. To download voting records for other MPs, look up their ODA IDs at oda.ft.dk, add the IDs to the column MP_names$MP_id in the file available at ./data/processed/csv/MP_names.csv and then run targets::tar_make().

Use

This data is openly available to everyone and can be used for any research or educational purpose. If you use this data in your research, please cite as specified in CITATION.cff.

The following citation formats are also available through Zenodo:

• BibTeX
• CSL
• DataCite
• Dublin Core
• DCAT
• JSON
• JSON-LD
• GeoJSON
• MARCXML

Zenodo provides an API (REST & OAI-PMH) to access the data. For example, the following command will return the metadata for the most recent version of the data

bash curl -i https://zenodo.org/api/records/10517955

Support

This project is maintained by @mtwente. Please understand that we can't provide individual support via email. We also believe that help is much more valuable when it's shared publicly, so more people can benefit from it.

| Type | Platforms | | -------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 🚨 Bug Reports | GitHub Issue Tracker | | 📊 Report bad data | GitHub Issue Tracker | | 📚 Docs Issue | GitHub Issue Tracker | | 🎁 Feature Requests | GitHub Issue Tracker | | 🛡 Report a security vulnerability | See SECURITY.md | | 💬 General Questions | GitHub Discussions |

Roadmap

• implement links to MPs' Wikidata Objects, perhaps using P10207
• implement gittargets
• implement frictionless-r
• implement tests
• in addition to the Zotero Group, provide bibliography for scientific literature on Northatlantic MPs as BibTeX file.

Contributing

All contributions to this repository are welcome! If you find errors or problems with the data, or if you want to add new data or features, please open an issue or pull request. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct and the process for submitting pull requests.

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. The available versions are listed in the tags on this repository.

Authors and acknowledgment

• Moritz Twente - Initial work - mtwente

See also the list of contributors who contributed to this project.

Voting records and ballot results were retrieved from Folketinget's open data service under Folketinget's terms of service.

License

The data in this repository is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License – see the LICENSE CC BY-SA file for details. By using this data, you agree to give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and to indicate if any modifications have been made.

The code in this repository is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 – see the LICENSE-AGPL file for details. By using this code, you agree to make any modifications available under the same license.