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As the reality of a hung parliament starts to sink in, economists, political scientists and commentators will begin their usual routine of “post mortem” analysis of the surprise result of the UK 2017 general election. My co-authors Sascha Becker and Dennis Novy have done a similar exercise studying the EU Referendum last year [see also here] and have worked on the question whether migration contributed to an erosion of pro EU sentiment [see also here].
For people wanting to get to work straight away, there are a few things slowing us down. The last constituency, Kensington, was not called until last night and so I dont expect the UK’s Election Commission to post the final tally of votes across all constituencies anytime before next week. Nevertheless, the crude election results data can be “scraped” from some infographics. This post describes how…
The Economist’s Infographics
The Economist, among other newspapers, provides a very nice infographic – behind that info graphic lies a web service that can be queried using JSON formed requests.
Each Parliamentary constituency has an identifier code that can be used to query the web service and pull the results. The URL for a request is quite simple:
http://infographics.economist.com/2017/ukelmap-2017/data/live-results2017/r2017E14000937.json
This provides the results for the constituency Cambridgeshire, South East. The JSON object looks as follows
resultCB({"swing": -3.84, "mpn": "Lucy Frazer", "electorate": "86121", "lib": 11958, "id": "E14000937", "name": "Cambridgeshire, South East", "lab": 17443, "con": 33601, "status": "hold", "pa_key": "123", "oth": 0, "region": "East Of England", "win": "con", "turnout": "63002"})
This piece of Javascript calls a function resultCB that updates one of the views of the infographic.
In order to convert this to an R data frame, we can use the RJSONIO or jsonlite package functions fromJSON, after having removed the part that calls the function, i.e.
library(jsonlite)
as.data.frame(fromJSON(gsub("\\)$","",gsub("resultCB\\(","",readLines(con="http://infographics.economist.com/2017/ukelmap-2017/data/live-results2017/r2017E14000937.json")))))
## id pa_key oth name win status swing lib
## 1 E14000937 123 0 Cambridgeshire, South East con hold -3.84 11958
## region mpn electorate turnout lab con
## 1 East Of England Lucy Frazer 86121 63002 17443 33601
In order to build a data.frame of all election results, all that is necessary is to loop over the set of constituency codes available. I share the results from this step in the following spreadsheet Data for UK 2017 General Election Results (Economist Infographic).
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