Parliamentary Data Sources & API Wrappers

A stub post for collecting together:

• code libraries that wrap APIs and datasets related to UK Parliament data;
• downloadable datasets (raw and annotated);
• API endpoints;
• etc.

If you know of any others, please let me know via the comments…

APIs

Official Parliament APIs

• UK Parliament data API: data from UK Parliament; the catalogue is most easily explored via http://explore.data.parliament.uk/.
• UK Parliament Members Data Platform (MNIS)

Secondary Source APIs

• TheyWorkForYou API

Python

• mnis: a small Python library that makes it easy to download data on UK Members of Parliament from http://data.parliament.uk/membersdataplatform (about)
• They Work For You API: no longer maintained?

R

• hansard: R package to automatically fetch data from the UK Parliament API; but not Hansard!
• twfy: R wrapper for TheyWorkForYou’s API (about)
• twfyR: another R wrapper for TheyWorkForYou’s API

Data Sourcing Applications

• Popbuilder: combined population estimates by selected LSOA (about, code)
• Constituency Boundaries: tool for exploring current and proposed constituency boundaries and downloading name, code, and Parliamentary electorate data (about)

Scrapers

• Parlparse: scripts from They Work For You for scraping Parlimanet website
• Members interests scraper (node.js?: (no README/howto)
• (old/archived APPG scraper (py))

Datasets

• Hansard Speeches and Sentiment: a public dataset of speeches in Hansard, with information on the speaking MP, their party, gender and age at the time of the speech. (Large files (~3GB) – example of how to query datafile using Apache Drill.)

Data Handling Utilities

• R code for internal DfT tool for Transport Appraisal and Strategic modelling (TASM) use: convert outputs from the National Trip End Model (NTEM) for use in the National Transport Model (NTM);

Miscellaneous

• Useful UK Politics Datasets Google doc