promisesPromises

Description

This application is an effort to identify differences in the language use in the manifestos of all Dutch political parties in recent years.

Installation

This application is made in Python 3.11.6. To install the required packages, run the following command in the terminal (in the project root):

First, create a virtual environment:

python -m venv venv

Then, activate the virtual environment:

venv/bin/activate

Then, install the required packages:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Data structure

Currently, only the manifestos of the Tweede Kamer elections are supported. All manifestos should be in pdf format. All the manifestos will be automatically identified when manifests of new Tweede Kamer elections are added. Adding TK elections is as easy as adding a directory with the year and month of the election (for example, 2017-03) within TK and adding the pdf files of the parties to that directory. The data folder has the following structure:

data
├── manifests
│   ├── <Abbreviation of the type of election>
│   │   ├── <Year-month of the election>
│   │   │   ├── <The program with the name of the party> 

This could look like this:

data
├── manifests
│   ├── TK
│   │   ├── 2017-03
│   │   │   ├── CDA.pdf

Joined programs

Some parties have joined programs. These are programs that are made by multiple parties. For these programs the following structure is used:

data
├── manifests
│   ├── TK
│   │   ├── 2017-03
│   │   │   ├── CDA+CU+PVV.pdf

This makes the program searchable by the individual parties, but acts as a separate program.

Tags

Some parties have only concept versions of their manifestos, or do not have selectable text. Add this information to the file by adding '#Concept' to the filename. Multiple tags can be added by separating them with a space. This looks like this:

data
├── manifests
│   ├── TK
│   │   ├── 2017-03
│   │   │   ├── CDA #Concept #NotExtractable.pdf

Currently, the following tags are supported:

• Concept: The manifesto is a concept version
• NotExtractable: The text in the pdf is not extractable (because it is a scanned document, for example)
• Untrimmed: The program is documented in an enumerable way, but the text is not trimmed (because the first and/or last page is part of another program, for example)
• Short: The program is a summary of the full program
• Simple: The program is written in more easily understandable language