To What Extent Do Candidates Support Each Other Redux – A One-Liner, Thirty Second Route to the Info

In More Storyhunting Around Local Elections Data Using Gephi – To What Extent Do Candidates Support Each Other? I described a visual route to finding out which local council candidates had supported each other on their nomination papers. There is also a thirty second route to that data that I should probably have mentioned;-)

From the Scraperwiki database, we need to interrogate the API:

To do this, we’ll use a database query language – SQL.

What we need to ask the database is which of the assentors (members of the support column) are also candidates (members of the candinit column, and just return those rows. The SQL command is simply this:

select * from support where support in (select candinit from support)

Note that “support” refers to two things here – these are columns:

select * from support where support in (select candinit from support)

and these are the table the columns are being pulled from:

select * from support where support in (select candinit from support)

Here’s the result of Runing the query:

We can also get a direct link to a tabular view of the data (or generate a link to a CSV output etc from the format selector).

There are 15 rows in this result compared to the 15 edges/connecting lines discovered in the Gephi approach, so each method corroborates the other:

Simples:-)