The clue’s in the name. EveryPolitician aims to provide data about, well, every politician. In the world.
It’s a simple but ambitious project to collect and share that data, in a consistent, open format that anyone can use.
Why? Because this resource doesn’t yet exist. And it would be incredibly useful, for a huge number of people and organisations all around the world.
When data is in a consistent, structured format, it can be reused by developers everywhere. You don’t have waste time scraping data and converting it into a format you can work with; instead, you can simply concentrate on making tools. And those tools can more easily be picked up, used and adapted to local needs anywhere in the world, saving everyone time and effort.
The long term aim is to include every elected official in the world, but let’s start simple. Our first goal is to have data for all present-day national-level legislators.
To see how far we’ve got, pick a country.
There’s more to this data than you’ll see there, though. For most datasets there is richer information available, including contact details, photos, gender, and more.
If you want to use that data, you can download it in two useful formats:
Want to start using it? Here's how to get the most recent data.
A note about the Popolo standard: it’s a rich, expressive format that, like a language, is used in many different ways by different authors. However, when we add data to EveryPolitician we always use Popolo according to the same, defined principles. It’s because of this consistency that the tools you build will work with EveryPolitician data from any country, for any country.
Want more detail? Interested in using this data in a web application or tool you’re building? See the technical overview of EveryPolitician.
See our handy guide to contributing.
In a way, that’s up to you. The data’s here, now go and build the tools to use it! (And don’t forget to let us know when you do.)
We already know that EveryPolitician’s data will help with existing projects, like these ones which make it easy to track what those politicians say, or watch what they do on Twitter, or which enable citizens to send public messages to them.
As data becomes available from more countries, all in the same format, more and more tools like this will become possible.