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mysociety / parlparse

The scraper/parser that produces data for TheyWorkForYou, PublicWhip, etc
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Party affiliations for years before 1997 #162

Closed macleginn closed 1 year ago

macleginn commented 1 year ago

The membership data in the people.json file doesn't seem to have party affiliations for years before 1997. Is this information accessible somewhere else?

dracos commented 1 year ago

Yes, Hansard did not contain parties before then, and that's where we sourced our historical information. Since then, the official parliament API at https://data.parliament.uk/membersdataplatform/memberquery.aspx does hold this information, so I guess someone could try and update ours from that, but I imagine that might prove tricky; it's available there anyway.

macleginn commented 1 year ago

Thanks! Do you know if the ids in this API correspond to any of the ids in the data or I should match by name?

dracos commented 1 year ago

If we've matched already, there's a datadotparl_id identifier in our data. Otherwise we use the historic Hansard person ID, but I'm not sure that is actually exposed anywhere else, so isn't that helpful I'm afraid. Some have Wikidata identifiers also. Matching by name will prove quite tricky, for example there were two Rowland Blennerhassets, both MP for Kerry, at the same time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Members_of_Parliament

macleginn commented 1 year ago

Oh dear. Thanks again!