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Process Party Representation Data for House of Representatives

Source: R/process_reps.R
process_reps.Rd

Standardises "Party representation" data for the House of Representatives from Australian federal elections in 2004, 2007, and 2010. This helper function aligns column names by renaming Total to National and LastElectionTotal to LastElection for consistency across these years. For other election years, the data is returned unprocessed with a message.

Usage

process_reps(data, event)

Arguments

data

A data frame containing "Party representation" data for a single election event from the House of Representatives. Must include an event column with a single unique value (e.g., "2004 Federal Election", "2007 Federal Election", "2010 Federal Election"). For processing years (2004, 2007, 2010), must include Total and LastElectionTotal columns. A date column is typically present as mandatory metadata.

event

A character string specifying the election event to process. Recognised values are "2004 Federal Election", "2007 Federal Election", or "2010 Federal Election". Other values result in the data being returned unprocessed.

Value

A data frame. For recognised election federal years (2004, 2007, 2010), it contains the standardised columns:

  • National (total party representation, renamed from Total)

  • LastElection (party representation from the last election, renamed from LastElectionTotal)

along with all other input columns (e.g., date, event). For unrecognised years, the original data frame is returned unchanged.

Details

This function processes "Party representation" data by:

  1. Standardising column names: For 2004, 2007, and 2010, renames Total to National and LastElectionTotal to LastElection using rename_cols().

  2. Unrecognised years: Returns the data unprocessed with an informative message for years other than 2004, 2007, or 2010.

The function assumes the input data frame contains the required columns (event, Total, and LastElectionTotal) for the specified processing years, as sourced from the AEC "Party representation" dataset for the House of Representatives.

Examples

# Sample 2004 data
data_2004 <- data.frame(
  date = "2004-10-09",
  event = "2004 Federal Election",
  PartyNm = "ALP",
  Total = 60,
  LastElectionTotal = 65
)
process_reps(data_2004, "2004 Federal Election")
#> Processing `2004 Federal Election` data to ensure all columns align across all elections.
#>         date                 event PartyNm National LastElection
#> 1 2004-10-09 2004 Federal Election     ALP       60           65

# Sample unprocessed year (e.g., 2013)
data_2013 <- data.frame(
  date = "2013-09-07",
  event = "2013 Federal Election",
  PartyNm = "LIB",
  National = 90,
  LastElection = 72
)
process_reps(data_2013, "2013 Federal Election")
#> No processing required for `2013 Federal Election`. Data returned unprocessed.
#>         date                 event PartyNm National LastElection
#> 1 2013-09-07 2013 Federal Election     LIB       90           72