Sunlight Api

The Sunlight Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that "advocates for open government globally and uses technology to make government more accountable to all." They provide multiple great APIs for political data, and this gem provides a clean, simple wrapper for the Sunlight Foundation APIs. It's currently a work in progress, and will be updated frequently to support more of their APIs.

Usage

Congress API

Legislators

To find the representatives for a certain location

Sunlight::Congress::Legislator.locate_by_zip(23219)
Sunlight::Congress::Legislator.locate(zip: 23219)
Sunlight::Congress::Legislator.locate(latitude: 37.538821, longitude: -77.433574)
Sunlight::Congress::Legislator.locate(address: '1000 Bank St, Richmond, VA')
Sunlight::Congress::Legislator.locate('37.538821, -77.433574') # Not recommended
Sunlight::Congress::Legislator.locate('1000 Bank St, Richmond, VA')

A zip code may intersect with multiple congressional districts, so to find all the legislators in a certain zip code, use the locate_by_zip method. The locate method can take parameters as either a string or hash of options (recommended for latitude/longitude or zip codes). All string queries will be geocoded into lat/long pairs.

To find a specific representative, you have multiple options for searching

Sunlight::Congress::Legislator.find('Warner') # Searches on the first, middle, last, and nickname fields
Sunlight::Congress::Legislator.find(gender: 'F', party: 'R') # All current female, republican legislators
Sunlight::Congress::Legislator.find(gender: 'F', party: 'R', all_legislators: true) # All past and present female, republican legislators
Sunlight::Congress::Legislator.find_by_state_rank('senior') # All legislators with a senior rank

The find method accepts either a string or hash of parameters. Strings will only query the first, middle, last, and nicknames of legislators. You can also find_by_ certain attributes. To see a list of accepted attributes (also applies to parameters passed into the find method), look here

By default, results are capped to the first 20 legislators. To overcome this, pass in the per_page: 'all' option. But keep in mind that this option automatically sets in_office: true. Alternatively, you can pass a page: X option to get more legislators.

Legislator location and searching methods return an array of Legislator objects

legislators = Sunlight::Congress::Legislator.find(gender: 'F', party: 'R')
legislators #=> [#<Sunlight::Congress::Legislator:0x007f8fb7834b88 @bioguide_id="E000295", @birthday="1970-07-01", @chamber="senate"...>, #<Sunlight::Congress::Legislator:0x007f8fb58b15e0 @bioguide_id="C001105", @birthday="1959-06-30", @chamber="house"...>, ...]
legislators[0].office #=> "825 B&c Hart Senate Office Building"

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'sunlight-api'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install sunlight-api

Get your API key and run:

Sunlight::Base.api_key = 'your_api_key'

Contributing