Methodology
This page explains how EveryPolitician collects, organises, and maintains data about political office-holders.
The concepts we use
A political position is an office which can be filled by different people at different times, like the President of Ethiopia. This position is distinct from the President of France, but it remains the same position when a new person fills it.
A politician is a person who fills a political position at any given time.
Occupancy is the time-bound link between a person (specifically, a politician) and a political position. It has start and end dates, as well as a status which indicates whether it’s current.
Inspired by the Wikidata Project EveryPolitician, OpenSanctions maps political positions primarily. We then fill in the details of who occupies each position at different points in time as information changes or becomes available. Our data model keeps the concepts of ‘person’ (or ‘politician’ in this case) and ‘position’ separate, and links them logically via ‘occupancy’ instances.
For the nerds: the relevant OpenSanctions schema types are Position (with a gov or similar topic), Person (with a role.pep topic), and Occupancy. More on topics.
How we get and work with the data
OpenSanctions maintains a fleet of crawlers than run regularly to get data about politicians from various sources.
Sources
Our data sources include government authorities and inter-governmental agencies, as well as community, civil-society, and journalistic organisations. They’re all listed on our sources page.
We automatically monitor and import these databases into our data, and also use data from certain sources to enrich the base data with further information.
Since the same person may well show up in multiple sources, we handily merge duplicate entities. If a politician has a Wikidata entry, that becomes the primary entity (we also use their Wikidata identifiers in these cases).
More at OpenSanctions on sources and enrichment.
Positions
Ideally, we want a full picture of all national positions: heads of state, cabinets, legislatures, and national judiciaries.
We also care about security and intelligence services, including the military and police, central bank leadership, diplomatic missions, and the senior leadership of intergovernmental organizations.
Further down the list, we welcome sub-national positions equivalent to the national ones, as well as state-owned enterprises, public entities, and agencies reporting to national government. Political party leadership and local positions are also welcome to the … party.
More at OpenSanctions on positions.
Updates and accuracy
Data is updated automatically when our sources change. For Wikidata-sourced information, updates typically appear within a few days of edits being made.
If you spot an error, the best way to fix it is to contribute a correction.
