turkeyelections: The Most Comprehensive Initial R Package Developed on Election Results in Turkey

Abstract

Election results offer more than just the vote percentages of the participating parties and candidates; they also enable valuable inferences across various domains, particularly about the characteristics of the society in which the elections are conducted, thereby attributing significance to the data on election outcomes. However, within the context of Turkey, it is observed that datasets containing election results in an easily accessible and processable format are limited. Of the 45 elections held from 1946 to 2023, only data for 13 are shared by the Supreme Election Council responsible for the elections. To address this issue in such a popular field, the user-friendly turkeyelections package has been developed within the R programming language environment. This package facilitates easy access and utilization of the results of 16 elections conducted in Turkey between 1995 and 2023, on both national and provincial levels, and has been available for use since February 2024. This study presents details and usage information about the turkeyelections package, the most comprehensive database on Turkish election results developed to date. It enables easy downloading, processing, merging with other datasets, and visualization within the R environment, marking it as the first R programming language package developed for election results in Turkey.