the swiss direct democracy R package

swissdd builds upon the real time data service for federal and cantonal votes provided by the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) via opendata.swiss. It brings the results of popular votes, aggregated at the geographical level of choice, straight into R. Available levels are

  • national
  • cantons
  • districts
  • municipalities

The package wraps the real time data on vote Sundays. As soon as the ballots close (from 12:00 on), the datastream is continuosly updated, until the data for all municipalities is complete and the final results are available. Additionally, it allows to access the archive and to retrieve the harmonized results of national votes since 1981. Additionally, it allows to access the archive and to retrieve the harmonized results of national votes since 1981, as well as loading data from the swissvotes-database, the most comprehensive database on swiss popular votes.

Thanks to a major contribution of David Zumbach the latest version contains brand new functions to retrieve geodata of administrative boundaries provided by the FSO and to plot vote result maps.

# installation from CRAN (stable)
install.packages("swissdd")

# installation from github (ongoing updates)
devtools::install_github("politanch/swissdd")

#realtimedata on vote-sundays or the data of the last votations
federalvotes <- get_nationalvotes(geolevel = "district")

#retrieve data for many votes from the archive, either by selecting indiviual dates...
federalvotes <- get_nationalvotes(votedates=c("2019-02-10","1984-09-23"), geolevel = "district")

#... or defining a range.
federalvotes <- get_nationalvotes(from_date="2017-01-01",to_date="2018-01-01", geolevel = "district")

# the results of cantonal votes are also available (2019-)

cantonalvotes <- get_cantonalvotes(votedates="2019-02-10", geolevel = "municipality")

The webservice of the FSO is documented on opendata.swiss (language settings can be found at the bottom of the page):

https://opendata.swiss/de/dataset/echtzeitdaten-am-abstimmungstag-zu-eidgenoessischen-abstimmungsvorlagen

https://opendata.swiss/de/dataset/echtzeitdaten-am-abstimmungstag-zu-kantonalen-abstimmungsvorlagen

The geodata for the administrative boundaries can be found here:

https://opendata.swiss/de/dataset/geodaten-zu-den-eidgenoessischen-abstimmungsvorlagen

More data on Swiss politics