
EveryPolitician: Open dataset on politicians - tfgg
http://everypolitician.org/
======
shakethemonkey
Political Graveyard[1] is the world's richest open dataset on American
politicians, and its size dwarfs everypolitician.org

[1] [http://www.politicalgraveyard.com/](http://www.politicalgraveyard.com/)

[Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with the site, not even sure who runs it]

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knowaveragejoe
I just wanna say, they could _definitely_ use with a facelift.

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unimpressive
Site loads fast, has information, not a UI trainwreck. Good enough for me.

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Diederich
Better than good enough: it's good. It's also preferable to something more
SPAish.

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.

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thomasfoster96
233 countries? It would be much better to organise the data in some sort of
heirarchy, given having the UK, Wales and Scotland all on the list is somewhat
confusing (and it leaves out US and Australian state legislatures).

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.

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anexprogrammer
> having the UK, Wales and Scotland all on the list is somewhat confusing

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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10)

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caf
Sure, but the Australian and US States similarly have parliaments with strong
jurisdictions - stronger than those of the Scotland, Wales and NI parliaments,
because the national legislatures in the federations have only limited scope.

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JumpCrisscross
> _mySociety Limited is a project of UK Citizens Online Democracy, a
> registered charity in England and Wales_

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](http://docs.everypolitician.org/contribute.html)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/01/snoopers-
cha...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/01/snoopers-charter-to-
extend-police-access-to-phone-and-internet-data)

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IanCal
I have tried reading through the documentation and looked at the github repo,
and cannot find a license.

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.

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DasIch
They don't even have current data on who is currently in parliament for many
countries and in the case they do that data is essentially worthless. I really
don't see the point of this.

If you want to bother at all, you should have data on the level of
[http://abgeordetenwatch.de](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/](http://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/)).

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everypolitician
> They don't even have current data on who is currently in parliament for many
> countries

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](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/](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…

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Sabinus
>this data is largely only available by scraping Have you considered
suggesting a data standard for .gov addresses to locate and format parliament
information? Writing scrapers for all countries _electorates_ elections seems
difficult.

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eriknstr
I was happy to see that they include politicians outside of the US.
Unfortunately there is no data about any of the politicians in my country yet.

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mrtksn
It's crowdsourced, it will have more info as it gains popularity

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terravion
Is this really a good idea? Open meetings laws, pre-vote publication, and a
variety of transparency measures have often backfired and gotten us worse,
more special interest controlled legislation.

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george_ciobanu
Can you provide examples? Ideally of both positive and negative outcomes.

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Taek
Sure, an easy example is public voting. When congressional votes are public,
it is very easy for special interest groups to reward or favor politicians who
vote correctly. It's easier to buy votes.

Otoh lots more information available to the public often also makes it easier
to detect lying and corruption.

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krick
It is a valid concern, but I think as usual it is more about if this data in
_possibly available_ , not if there exists such a service as this. Because if
it is, then there surely is somebody, who has this information, as thus
possesses power that you (and me) do not possess. In that case I'd argue that
public availability is somewhat better. In the end, you do know that somebody
is buying votes, it is just that you cannot do that. It is very much possible
that they already have closed back-office system like this.

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".

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notahacker
I agree that _readily available to the average person_ tends to be better than
_possibly available_

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.

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donmatito
That's an awesome project. Some civic tech initiatives promise to bring
transparency on representative activity/lazyness, vote records, or
transparency/corruption. This promises to unify datasets in a consistent,
comparable manner. Very interesting

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donmatito
And to everyone who says "this dataset is missing", well =>
[http://docs.everypolitician.org/contribute.html](http://docs.everypolitician.org/contribute.html)

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Goldenromeo
Have you considered allowing email signup for the gender balance game feature?

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newscracker
I attempted the trial, and when faced with a login requirement (with Twitter,
Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Github), I just left the site.

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.

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nailer
From the site's UI:

> 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.

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notahacker
I can see the logic of having a _default_ choice, but UX really shouldn't
assume its users don't have a passport.

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)

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pani00
> If you know where to find more data for this country, please let us know.

Wikipedia.

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devoply
politicians are mere servants. need a better open data set on the people and
corps they serve.

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Steeeve
Have a look at the sunlight foundation apis. I know they have one that spells
out donations. (it was US based the last I worked with their datasets in
detail, but the goal was to grow and it's been several years).

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foxfired
233 countries, 0 from my country.

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krick
Well, contribute.

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everypolitician
Even letting us know where to _find_ data for your country would be a big
help. For the few countries we're missing —
[http://everypolitician.org/needed.html](http://everypolitician.org/needed.html)
— it's because we haven't been able to find any source of who the legislators
are there.

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nodesocket
I quickly scanned the title and thought it would include each politician's net
worth.

Strange use of "richest", I would have personally gone with "largest" but...

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Fifer82
I can't believe my tax pays for so many useless cretins and the UK is still on
its knees.

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id122015
Thank you for such a useful project, its a good start. Ill happily contribute
with data sources, also I can translate the website in other languages if
requested.

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.

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maaaats
You may not like taxes, but calling it theft always belittles the discussion.

