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This repository contains code to build cosponsorship networks from bills (and motions) passed in the Finnish Parliament.

For related work, see the finpar package.

HOWTO

Important note: the scraper is currently broken due to a website redesign that makes the search engine inaccessible for various projects, including this one. It is unlikely that this issue will get fixed in the near future, but please feel free to ask for the raw data collected for years 1999–2014 (the code will process it without breaking).

DATA

Bills

  • url -- bill URL
  • year -- year of introduction
  • authors -- semicolon-separated sponsor names
  • n_au -- total number of sponsors
  • legislature -- legislature number (35 or 36)

Sponsors

  • profile_url -- URL to access the sponsor profile
  • url -- alternative profile URL (see below)
  • year -- year of entry in parliament
  • photo_url -- photo URL
  • name -- sponsor name
  • name_full -- sponsor full name (same as in bills data)
  • born -- year of birth
  • party -- political party, abbreviated
  • constituency -- constituency, stored as the string to its Wikipedia Suomi entry
  • partyname -- political party, full name
  • party_length -- number of political parties the sponsor has belonged to
  • mandate -- semicolon-separated years of mandate, used to compute the nyears seniority variable
  • sex -- gender (F/M), imputed from first names
  • photo -- photo URL, simplified to its filename

The Eduskunta website uses a very strange URL system: two URLs are necessary to scrape the sponsors, which explains the four different URL variables (two for the sponsor profile, one for the original photo URL and one for the shortened version).

If the URL at line 132 in data.r fails to work (which is almost certainly going to be the case):

  • visit this index page
  • extract the string stored into the THWIDS parameter when clicking 'Next page' (Seuraava at the bottom-right of the page; copy the URL to the clipboard to view it)
  • remove the part before the first period, which should be 100
  • replace the string .21/1421346561_16245 on line 110 with the new string

THANKS

Thanks to Leo Lahti, Joona Lehtomäki and Juha Yrjölä for pointers on how to impute gender from Finnish names: see this discussion and this discussion.