Title: Access the Polarization in Comparative Attitudes Project
Version: 1.0.1
Description: Distributes data from the Polarization in Comparative Attitudes Project. Helper functions enable data retrieval in wide and tidy formats for user-defined countries and years. Provides support for case-insensitive country names in many languages. Mehlhaff (2022) https://imehlhaff.net/files/Polarization%20and%20Democracy.pdf.
License: CC0
Encoding: UTF-8
RoxygenNote: 7.2.0
URL: https://github.com/imehlhaff/PolarCAP
BugReports: https://github.com/imehlhaff/PolarCAP/issues
Depends: R (≥ 2.10)
Imports: tidyr, countrycode
NeedsCompilation: no
Packaged: 2023-07-08 16:00:33 UTC; IsaacMehlhaff
Author: Isaac Mehlhaff ORCID iD [aut, cre, cph]
Maintainer: Isaac Mehlhaff <isaac.mehlhaff@gmail.com>
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2023-07-10 16:10:12 UTC

Retrieve PolarCAP Data

Description

Retrieves PolarCAP data for defined countries and years. Returns data in wide format. For tidy format, use melt.PolarCAP().

Usage

get.PolarCAP(
  countries = NA,
  years = NA,
  type = c("ideology", "affect"),
  value.only = FALSE,
  include.se = FALSE
)

Arguments

countries

a character vector of countries to be retrieved. See Details.

years

a numeric vector of years to be retrieved.

type

a character vector indicating which polarization estimates should be returned. Must be "ideology", "affect", or both.

value.only

a logical indicating whether get.PolarCAP() should return a data frame of results (FALSE, the default) or a single estimate as a scalar (TRUE).

include.se

a logical indicating whether standard errors should be returned. Defaults to FALSE.

Details

Ideally, country names passed to countries would be ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country codes (case-insensitive). However, get.PolarCAP() will accept country names in almost any language or format and attempt to convert them to ISO3 codes by calling to.ISO3(). get.PolarCAP() will alert the user to any country names still unrecognized after this conversion and return results only for those which are recognized.

Value

If value.only = FALSE, get.PolarCAP() returns a data frame with columns corresponding to country names, country ISO3 codes, years, polarization estimates for the polarization type(s) given in type, and associated standard errors (if include.se = TRUE). If value.only = TRUE, get.PolarCAP() returns a scalar polarization estimate for the polarization type given in type.

Examples

get.PolarCAP("USA", c(2018, 2019), "ideology", include.se = TRUE)
get.PolarCAP("USA", c(2018, 2019), c("ideology", "affect"), include.se = TRUE)

countries <- rep(c("MEX", "USA"), each = 2)
years <- rep(c(2018, 2019), 2)
data <- as.data.frame(cbind(countries, years))

data$ideology1 <- apply(data, 1, function(x) get.PolarCAP(x[1], x[2], type = "ideology",
value.only = TRUE))
data

Retrieve Tidy PolarCAP Data

Description

Retrieves PolarCAP data for defined countries and years. Returns data in tidy format. For wide format, or to return a polarization estimate as a scalar, use get.PolarCAP().

Usage

melt.PolarCAP(
  countries = NA,
  years = NA,
  type = c("ideology", "affect"),
  include.se = FALSE
)

Arguments

countries

a character vector of countries to be retrieved. See Details.

years

a numeric vector of years to be retrieved.

type

a character vector indicating which polarization estimates should be returned. Must be "ideology", "affect", or both.

include.se

a logical indicating whether standard errors should be returned. Defaults to FALSE.

Details

Ideally, country names passed to countries would be ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country codes (case-insensitive). However, melt.PolarCAP() will accept country names in almost any language or format and attempt to convert them to ISO3 codes by calling to.ISO3(). melt.PolarCAP() will alert the user to any country names still unrecognized after this conversion and return results only for those which are recognized.

Value

a data frame with columns corresponding to country names, country ISO3 codes, years, polarization types given in type, polarization estimates, and associated standard errors (if include.se = TRUE).

Examples

melt.PolarCAP("USA", c(2018, 2019), "ideology", include.se = TRUE)
melt.PolarCAP("USA", c(2018, 2019), c("ideology", "affect"), include.se = TRUE)

Convert Country Names for PolarCAP Retrieval

Description

Checks if requested countries are formatted correctly for PolarCAP and attempts to convert them to ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country codes if not.

Usage

to.ISO3(countries)

Arguments

countries

a character vector of countries to be checked (case-insensitive).

Value

a character vector of length equal to that of countries.

Examples

to.ISO3(c("ALB", "aus", "united states"))