legislatoR

Political, sociodemographic, and Wikipedia-related data on political elites

legislatoR is a fully relational individual-level data package for the software environment R. It comprises political, sociodemographic, and Wikipedia-related data on elected politicians across the globe. The current development version (0.0.0.9000) includes 22,917 elected politicians from all legislative sessions of the Austrian Nationalrat, the German Bundestag, the Irish Dáil, the French Assemblée, and the United States Congress (House and Senate). For each legislature, the package currently holds nine datasets:

  1. Core (basic sociodemographic data)
  2. Political (basic political data)
  3. History (full revision records of individual Wikipedia biographies)
  4. Traffic (daily user traffic on individual Wikipedia biographies from July 2015 to October 2017)
  5. Social (social media handles and personal website URLs)
  6. Facial (URLs to individual Wikipedia portraits and a range of facial recognition estimates based on these portraits)
  7. Office (public offices)
  8. Occupation (professions)
  9. IDs (a range of identifiers linking a politician to another file, database, or website)

The package with a detailed description as well as installation and usage instructions are available on GitHub.

legislatoR is joint work with Simon Munzert and in part funded by the Daimler and Benz Foundation (Funding period 2017/18; project "Citizen and Elite Activity on the Wikipedia Market Place of Political Information")