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Supplementary and replication materials for the paper
"The Comparative Legislators Database"

This repository contains supplementary and replication materials for the paper "The Comparative Legislators Database" by Sascha Göbel and Simon Munzert, published in British Journal of Political Science. See also the corresponding R package legislatoR.

Abstract

Knowledge about political representatives’ behavior is crucial for a deeper understanding of politics and policy-making processes. Yet resources on legislative elites are scattered, often specialized, limited in scope, or not always accessible. We introduce the Comparative Legislators Database (CLD), which joins micro-data collection efforts on open-collaboration platforms and other sources, and integrates with renowned political science datasets. The CLD includes political, sociodemographic, career, online presence, public attention, and visual information for over 45,000 contemporary and historical politicians from ten countries. We provide a straightforward and open-source interface to the database through an R package, offering targeted, fast, and analysis-ready access in formats familiar to social scientists and standardized across time and space. We verify the data against human-coded datasets and illustrate its use for investigating legislator prominence and turnover. The CLD contributes to a central hub for versatile information about legislators and their behavior, supporting individual-level comparative research over long periods

Description of folders and files

  • Code: contains R code and other files for replication of analyses, validation, and figures
  • Data: contains all data required for replication of analyses and validation
  • Figures: contains all figures presented in the paper and appendix
  • Sources and Source code for assembling the database. HTML files required for replicating the initial automatic data collection procedure are available from the authors upon request.

Author information

Sascha Göbel (corresponding author and repository maintainer)
University of Konstanz
Graduate School of Decision Sciences and Center for Data and Methods
Box 85
D-78457 Konstanz, Germany
Email: sascha.goebel [at] uni-konstanz.de

Simon Munzert
Hertie School of Governance
Quartier 110 - Friedrichstrasse 180
D-10117 Berlin, Germany
Email: munzert [at] hertie-school.org