Loading_The_ECD

In this vignette I introduce you to the basic functions of the ecdata package. You can download the latest stable releases of the packages through CRAN and PyPi

library(ecdata)
library(dplyr)
## 
## Attaching package: 'dplyr'
## The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
## 
##     filter, lag
## The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
## 
##     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

load_ecd

The primary function that is shared across the Python and R distributions of the package is the load_ecd function. This function accepts four primary arguments:

Argument R Specific Quirks Python Specific Quirks
country A String/A String Vector String, Dictionary, or List
language A String/A String Vector String, Dictionary, or List
full_ecd A boolean if set to TRUE downloads full dataset. Defaults to FALSE A boolean if set to True downloads full dataset. Defaults to False
ecd_version A character string of the ECD version you want to download. Defaults to latest version A character string of the ECD version you want to download. Defaults to latest version

Functionally the ecd_version argument is not entirely useful since there has only been one release of the data.

Say we only wanted data for South Korea1 we can simply set the country argument like this:

rok = load_ecd(country = 'Republic of Korea')
## ✔ Successfully downloaded Republic of Korea.
head(rok, 2)
## # A tibble: 2 × 17
##   country   url   text  date                title executive type  language file 
##   <chr>     <chr> <chr> <dttm>              <chr> <chr>     <chr> <chr>    <chr>
## 1 Republic… http… ​위대하… 2022-03-10 00:00:00 정직한 … Yoon Suk… Spee… Korean   <NA> 
## 2 Republic… http… ​위대하… 2022-03-10 00:00:00 정직한 … Yoon Suk… Spee… Korean   <NA> 
## # ℹ 8 more variables: isonumber <dbl>, gwc <chr>, cowcodes <chr>,
## #   polity_v <chr>, polity_iv <chr>, vdem <dbl>, year_of_statement <dbl>,
## #   office <chr>

We implement caching by default so you will get a pretty shouty warning every few hours in R. load_ecd has some tolerance for common names, abbreviations, and mixed punctuations of countries so if we wanted to download the same data using RK, ROK, or South Korea these will all download the South Korean data.

R

sk = load_ecd(country = 'South Korea')
## ✔ Successfully downloaded Republic of Korea.

The same functionality is extended to the language argument too!

  1. I choose South Korea because the underlying file is relatively small compared to some of the other country files.↩︎