This program downloads the election data available on the Service public fédéral Intérieur. This data contains the votes for each party in many Belgium elections since the 18s century at the municipality level. For more information go to their ℹ️ Info Page.
Data is stored in the data/ directory in the following pattern data/election_type/election_date/district_type.csv. The data is stored in a CSV file with the following columns:
| Header | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Parti | str | Name of the party |
| Nombre de sièges | int | Number of seats won by the party |
| Nombre de voix | int | Number of votes won by the party |
| type of district (e.g. "canton") | str | The district of the data |
| date | int | The year of the election |
| election | str | The election type |
This code uses Selenium webdriver to download the data. You can find the installation instructions here. The required packages are listed in the requirements.txt file and you can install them from pip using the following command:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Geckodriver is used to control the Firefox browser. You can download it from here or using homebrew on macOS:
brew install geckodriver
End with an example of getting some data out of the system or using it for a little demo.
The file resultat.py contains the functions that are used to download the data. The main function is download_election and you can find the documentation for it in the file. The second function get_download_url is used to get the download link for a specific election queue. It can be imported with:
from resultat import *There are two programs to download the data. The first one is on get_results.py and downloads the data for a specific election queue. It should be better for people interested in donwnloading a single file. For this program I recommend running on terminal as it uses inquirer package which I have found some issues within Jupyter interactive terminals. You can do it with:
python get_results.py
After this, you will be asked to select the election type, date and district type you want to download.
The second program is on get_all.py and downloads all the data available on the website. This takes longer than the previous one since it scrapes the entire website for data. It can be run in a similar way:
python get_all_results.py
or you can use it on an interactive terminal.
If this code is useful for your research, please consider citing it as:
@software{resultatselection,
author = {Antunes-Neto, Jose},
title = {{Scraped data from Le Service public fédéral Intérieur}},
url = {https://github.com/github/joseparreiras/resultatselection},
version = {1.0.0},
date = {2023-02-02}
}or refer to GitHub's "Cite this repository" button.