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krpoltext

krpoltext provides convenient R access to two large-scale Korean political text corpora described in:

Lim, T.H. (2025). South Korean Election Campaign Booklet and Party Statements Corpora. Scientific Data, 12, 1030. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05220-4

Corpus Period Candidates / Entries Description
Election Campaign Booklets 2000–2022 49,678 candidates Manifesto booklets from candidates in presidential, National Assembly, and local elections
Party Statements 2003–2022 82,723 statements Official statements and leadership meeting minutes from the two major parties

Data is hosted on the Open Science Framework (DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/RCT9Y) and automatically downloaded on first use.

Installation 

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("taehyun-lim/krpoltext")

Quick Start 

library(krpoltext)

# Load a dataset (auto-downloads from OSF on first use, then cached)
ps <- load_party_statements()
cb <- load_campaign_booklet()

# Explore metadata
metadata("party_statements")

# Filter documents
docs_2020 <- get_docs("party_statements", year = 2020)
conservative <- get_docs("party_statements", year = 2018:2022, conservative = 1)

# Campaign booklets: filter by office and party
assembly <- get_docs("campaign_booklet", office = "national_assembly", .data = cb)

Data Download

The CSV files (~1.5 GB total) are downloaded from OSF on first load:

# Auto-download: asks for consent interactively
ps <- load_party_statements()

# Or download all datasets at once
download_data()

# Provide a local file path instead
ps <- load_party_statements(path = "~/Downloads/sk_party_statements_v2022.csv")

Data is cached as compressed RDS in tools::R_user_dir("krpoltext", "cache") and verified via SHA-256 checksums. Subsequent loads take ~2 seconds.

Integration with quanteda 

library(quanteda)

corp <- as_quanteda_corpus(ps, docid_field = "id")
toks <- tokens(corp, remove_punct = TRUE)
dfm_obj <- dfm(toks)
topfeatures(dfm_obj, 20)

Functions

Function Description
load_campaign_booklet() Load the campaign booklet corpus
load_party_statements() Load the party statements corpus
metadata() Dataset metadata (columns, counts, citation)
get_docs() Filter documents by any column
as_quanteda_corpus() Convert to a quanteda corpus object
download_data() Download datasets from OSF
clear_cache() Remove cached data files

Citation

If you use this data in academic work, please cite the Data Descriptor paper:

Lim, T.H. (2025). South Korean Election Campaign Booklet and Party Statements Corpora. Scientific Data, 12, 1030. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05220-4

And the data repository:

Lim, T.H. (2024). South Korean Election Campaign Booklet Corpus and Party Statements Corpus. OSF. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RCT9Y

citation("krpoltext")

License