BrefInit v1.0.2

Constitution of the BRÉF database

• Copyright 2019-2020 Vincent Labatut

BrefInit is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. For source availability and license information see licence.txt

• Lab website: http://lia.univ-avignon.fr/
• GitHub repo: https://github.com/BrefAvignon/BrefInit
• Contact: Vincent Labatut vincent.labatut@univ-avignon.fr

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Description

This set of R scripts was written to initialize BRÉF (Base de données Révisée des Élu·es de France -- Revised Database of Representatives Elected in France), a data base containing a description of all types of representatives elected in France under the Fifth Republic. It is mainly based on the RNE (Répertoire National des Élus -- National Registry of Elected Representatives), the open data base of the French Parliament (including both the National Assembly and Senate), as well as the European Parliament website. All details are available in our technical report [LFM'20].

The data table produced by these scripts, as well as various plots and descriptive statistics, are available on Zenodo. Note that the next phase of the processing of the BRÉF data is implemented in a separate repository: see BrefConversion.

Data

The raw data located in the in folder directly come from the mentioned sources (RNE and parliamentary datasets). They are required to execute the scripts, as those basically perform a series of transformations and verifications on these data. Because the files are too big, they have been zipped: it is thus necessary to unzip the files located in folder in/extraction1/tables before launching hte process.

Organization

Here are the folders composing the project:

• Folder in: all the input files, including raw data, secondary data and verification files.
• Folder log: log files produced during the processing.
• Folder out: data files and plots produced during the processing.
• Folder src: all the source files.

Installation

You just need to install R and the required packages:

1. Install the R language
2. Download this project from GitHub and unzip.
3. Install the required packages:
   1. Open the R console.
   2. Set the current directory as the working directory, using setwd("<my directory>").
   3. Run the install script src/install.R.

Use

In order to load the tables and generate the description files:

1. Open the R console.
2. Set the project root as the working directory, using setwd again.
3. Launch the src/main.R script, and the files will be generated in the out folder. Note that the process is very long (3-4 days in total).

This results in a number of tables and plots, as well as a unique table containing all the integrated and corrected data. It corresponds to the first verstion of the BRÉF, whose content was later moved to a proper PostgreSQL data base, resulting in the second version. This first version was used in the course of Noémie Févrat's PhD.

Dependencies

• stringdist package: used to compare names and detect spelling mistakes.
• future.apply package: parallel computing.

Todo

• ...

Changelog

• 1.0.2: fixed errors in the documentations and comments, included the original data tables.
• 1.0.1: fixed a bug when loading CD (infinite loop when adding missing columns).
• 1.0.0: base version.

References

• [LFM'20] V. Labatut, N. Févrat & G. Marrel, BRÉF – Base de données Révisée des Élu·es de France, Technical Report, Avignon Université, 2020. ⟨hal-02886580⟩
• [F'24] N. Févrat, Le "mandat de trop" ? La réélection des parlementaires et des maires en France et les conditions de sa remise en cause, PhD Thesis, Avignon Université, 2024. ⟨tel-04550896⟩