EveryPolitician: Open dataset on politicians
everypolitician.org
everypolitician.org
[1] http://www.politicalgraveyard.com/
[Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with the site, not even sure who runs it]
Lawrence Kestenbaum, attorney, politician, and the creator and webmaster of The Political Graveyard website.
To be clear: I've professionally written such javascript only Single Page Applications, and they worked out really well, since they were all dynamic, real-time changing content all the way.
In terms of utility to effort ratio, I think it's right to start with national legislatures. However, I hope there will eventually be a dataset that's as deep as Political Graveyard for the entire planet, even if just to satisfy my inner data nerd :)
Also, I'm wondering how the data was collected - the party affiliation information for the Australian parliament is very strange. Not entirely wrong, but probably misleading.
Why? UK is comprised of countries with their own legislatures (with devolved and varying powers). England doesn't. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have parliaments, and their own politicians so need an entry. They all elect MPs to the Westminster UK parliament as well. Just as all these areas elect EU MEPs too.
CGP Grey explains UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10
He has another on why "how many countries are there?" is a difficult question [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+many+countr...
For Australia we get our information primary from http://www.openaustralia.org.au/ — if you can give any pointers to where things are wrong, we can correct them.
0: http://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian_S...
Secondly, in Australia the Liberal National Party is a partial merger of the Liberal and National parties. MPs in the LNP can be a member of either the Liberals or Nationals. In the House of Representatives data for Australia, the breakdown of LNP MPs between the two parties is incorrect, and leaves one MP as a sole member of the LNP. The errors are similar in the Senate data.
Additionally, two politicians (Bob Katter and Jacqui Lambie) are wrongly shown as being independents, despite being elected as the sole member of a party.
With the Liberal National Party is this a distinction between the electoral party and the parliamentary party? i.e. do people stand for election as one of Liberal or National, but then sit in a group as a single Liberal National Party? Or do they each sit as members of distinct parties which are, in turn, in coalition?
Or, from another angle, what would you expect to see within our data: a combined "Liberal National Party" for each person (with a separate field to show which party they stood for election as), or individual "Liberal Party" and "National Party" affiliations at the MP level, with the coalition shown at a party/term level?
Wikipedia shows LNP MPs as being a part of the LNP, with a note stating their affiliation.
Contributing data [1] on powerful people carries risks. These risks depend on whose information you are sharing, how you got it and your country's strength of rule of law.
Britain has very broad dragnet surveillance laws on its books [2]. If you are going to contribute, please consider the INFOSEC and OPSEC ramifications of those laws.
[1] http://docs.everypolitician.org/contribute.html
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/01/snoopers-cha...
Could you please add one? I currently can't work out what I'd be able to use this for, so far I'd be concerned I cannot reuse it in any way at all.
If you want to bother at all, you should have data on the level of http://abgeordetenwatch.de (for Germany only but surely similar projects exist in other countries). So how they voted, which committees are they part of, which jobs (beside being a politician) do they have. If you can get it, even which lobbyists they've met with (http://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/).
Unfortunately, in the vast majority of countries, this data is largely only available by scraping — and often parliaments completely revamp their websites when a new term starts, meaning our scrapers need rewritten then. We're aware we're behind in some countries, but we're up to date in most, and help with bringing us forward on the others is always appreciated! (This is an unfunded project run by a tiny team within a charity). Or, when people let us know that they're using the data for a country (or would use it if it were up to date!), then we prioritise working on that.
It's also possible that we simply haven't noticed that there's a new term somewhere. There's an average of one general election per week throughout the world, and sometimes we miss one, especially if there's a long gap between the election and the term starting, or even the list of legislators being published. So please let us know where we're missing something.
> If you want to bother at all, you should have data on the level of http://abgeordetenwatch.de
Yes, that's the goal. But it's going to take us time to get there! We also run https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ in the UK, so we know the value of having that level of information available. Our experience in helping groups in other countries set up similar sites led us to create EveryPolitician. Its goal is not to be a replacement for sites like that, which will always need local knowledge and context to be effective — it's to help people building such sites get up and running quicker, and free them up to focus more on holding politicians to account, not in spending all their time fixing broken scrapers etc.
And, by transforming all the underlying data to a consistent format, there can also hopefully be significantly more tool reuse, rather than everyone reinventing the wheel every time. This whole sector is massively underfunded, and so much time, energy, and money is wasted simply replicating what exists in other countries. There'll never be a one-size-fits-all solution for most of this, but being able to get started quicker, and to re-use pieces that already exist (e.g. for letting people write to their representatives, or visualise gender-breakdown over time, or compare attendance records across parties, etc) means that groups can deliver more value within their usually very tight budgets.
We prioritised going broad rather than deep to start with, because there's value in being able to do even very shallow comparisons across multiple countries — even just having the _names_ of the current national legislators in almost every country in the world turns out to be quite useful if, say, you're an investigative journalist needing to filter millions of documents (think Wikileaks, Panama Papers, etc) — and to give people something to build on top of while we work on going much deeper. That's slowly starting to happen now, but largely prioritised by user need, as we don't have the resources to go deep everywhere at once. But help is always very very welcome! Simply even telling us where we can get data for most countries is hugely valuable, though for the 95% of countries that don't supply that in structured formats, helping to write scrapers would be wonderful too…
Otoh lots more information available to the public often also makes it easier to detect lying and corruption.
It concerns me more that "politician" is a very ambiguous word. Basically everybody active enough is a politician, even though he may or may not be in senate, belong to some party and such. And an open dataset on "pretty much everybody" seems a bit more questionable than on those we consider "being in charge".
In practice, aggregation services like this tend to have more benign results like enabling the bulk emailing of politicians. Others include the suspicion that the popularity of Theyworkforyou, a UK site run by the same people which parses open data on parliamentary speeches and votes, might have had the effect of encouraging MPs to make brief, inconsequential speeches in order to boost statistics on their relative activity in Parliament. Another area in which the effect of their data aggregation might be considered questionable is where it's used as an authoritative source that a particular MP is "strongly against" a particular "cause", when in actual fact they may simply have voted with the party line against a particular bill related to that cause purely due to concerns about one specific aspect of that bill.
Even an email signup wouldn't be fine for me. I don't want any achievements to brag about. I just wanted to learn and/or contribute.
> Find representatives from your country:
Expected to use the box to find representatives. Instead it's a place to enter your country.
You should already know my country. Let me type in a representative's name.
Plus the real purpose of the feature is to showcase that it can return lists of politicians by nationality/body for many countries. At individual politician level, I can find a whole lot more information by typing their name into UK-specific sites (some of them actually run by the same people)
Wikipedia.
Strange use of "richest", I would have personally gone with "largest" but...
And most importantly for those who live in countries with huge tax rates, next time when Ill protect my hard earned money that they try to steal as tax and inflation, Ill use the feature to donate it to this website.