parlnet: v1.8 – Additional data and improvements

This release

• adds one additional legislature to Bulgaria and Hungary
• adds one additional legislature to Sweden and improves JSON parsing
• saves all data locally for Austria, the Czech Republic, Italy and Romania
• documents a critical issue with the scraper for Finland
• updates the data to August 2015 for all countries except Finland
• updates the code to the redesigned website of Iceland
• loses some package dependencies associated only to France
• improves the scraper for Italy (thanks to Jeroen Ooms for his help)

The repository now builds 120 networks from approximately 454 years of data.

The code for Italy contains various improvements to functions.r and to how variables are checked while assembling the sponsor datasets. These improvements will be propagated to all other repositories by the next release.