About EveryPolitician
EveryPolitician is a global database of political office-holders, from rulers, law-makers to judges and more. It is a project of OpenSanctions, an international database of persons and companies of political, criminal, or economic interest.
Why it exists
We think that tracking political office-holders creates a basis for accountability for government decisions and actions, and that in any democracy, the public should be able to identify who is responsible for which role and who holds which powers.
The information on public officials is often fractured, making it harder to effectively do research. We believe that the best way of collecting it is through a social process that is inspired by Wikipedia and the broader read/write web.
We hope that EveryPolitician can be a compendium for citizens, a research resource for civil society, and an anti-corruption tool for industry. At OpenSanctions we’ve managed to build a commercially sustainable open database, but we equally want to work with a community to make the data relevant to your needs.
How it can be used
The Research section lists political positions and office-holders by region. You can browse countries or territories to see the list of positions, and see the different holders of a position as well as any other data available.
But to do something with the data, you probably want a bit more than to browse:
- The Politically Exposed Persons Collection on OpenSanctions — you can download the data in bulk here.
- Using the OpenSanctions API / Sign up for an API key — we grant free keys for journalists and public-interest users.
- Licensing OpenSanctions bulk data — for commercial use.
Credits / resources
Project team: Johan Schuijt (resolve.works), Ivan Stavropoltsev, Edith V, Brenna Maeve, Friedrich Lindenberg
The current site is a re-born and re-imagined version of the original EveryPolitician project. EveryPolitician.org was created by mySociety to support civic technology projects worldwide. Read their blog post about ending the project.
The Govdirectory WikiProject feeds into our list of political positions, while the every politician WikiProject feeds into our list of politicians.
Other cool projects:
