Earlier this month, the CIA announced it had terminated its public repository, The World Factbook. Evolving from hard copy to digital, this database on countries, their economies, and populations has served as an essential resource for journalists, researchers, academics, and even school pupils for decades.
With the site disappearing without prior warning, save for a brief obituary on the CIA website, we’re taking this opportunity to invite feedback on the beta version of a political data project we’ve been steadily evolving.
Don’t worry — we’re not taking over The Factbook! But we have been passed another torch. Meet EveryPolitician: a global database of nearly 690,000 political office-holders, from rulers and lawmakers, to judges and more.
The current site is a reimagination of the original EveryPolitician project, which was created by UK non-profit mySociety in 2003 to empower citizens through online technology. EveryPolitician was paused in 2019 because the overwhelming task of gathering up-to-date parliamentary data could not be sustained in a grant-funded setting.
Over the last nine months, a small team at OpenSanctions has been working to build a new home for the project and update this essential public knowledge resource.
Political data matters
Information on public officials is often fragmented, making it hard to conduct effective research. Continuing the idea pioneered by mySociety, we’ve set out to make data on political office-holders more transparent.
The challenge: very few countries actually publish a consolidated index of elected and other senior officials (hooray Denmark and Brazil!). OpenSanctions, as a list data aggregator, can still build crawlers for key sources: parliamentary members or asset declaration systems for state officials, for example.
But there’s a limit to this. For example, we’ve been maintaining a crawler for the judges of the Cayman Supreme Court for two years. Since then, changes to the site have forced us to rebuild that crawler three times. The judges, however, haven’t yet changed.
To address this, we’re committing to a hybrid approach: data that can be automatically collected from official sources is augmented with information from the structured-data sibling of Wikipedia, Wikidata.
This mix of government-published lists and community-produced and peer-reviewed reference data is then presented on EveryPolitician, which effectively serves as a transparent review and verification mechanism.
Johan Schuijt, who has been spearheading the project for OpenSanctions, says:
"Understanding who holds power is fundamental to democracy. That’s easier said than done though — the data on who-is-a-politician-where is scattered across the web. We think that by continuing the EveryPolitician project, we have a good chance at fostering a community that together can nurture this dataset."
So far, EveryPolitician contains nearly 700,000 politicians holding office across 261 countries and territories. These include internationally recognized states, territories with de facto self-governance, and subnational jurisdictions.
Our data sources are listed on our sources page and include government authorities and intergovernmental agencies, as well as community, civil society, and journalistic organisations.
In the last six months alone, we have added 21 government officeholder data sources, 20 of which relate to parliaments (either individual chambers or full parliaments), and one covering mayors and councillors. Thanks to our tireless data engineers, this coverage will again expand significantly in 2026.
On the other hand, we’re also investing in tools that deepen our relationship with the Wikidata community: collaborating with existing projects like GovDirectory to map out the structure of international government systems, and developing PoliLoom, our own authoring and review tool for political data in Wikidata (stay tuned for more on this!).
Underpinning all this is our consistent, data-driven methodology: We classify a politician as anyone holding public authority: presidents, parliamentarians, legislators, judges, senior officials, and even military commanders. EveryPolitician’s Research section lists political positions and officeholders by region, and its interactive map lets you hover over or click a specific country to view an overview of the political positions held there.
Why regions? Not everyone agrees on borders, sovereignty, or who controls what. Territories may be disputed, occupied, or governed differently from how they appear on a standard map.
Here are a few ways you can use the data, beyond just browsing:
- 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 — did you know we grant free keys for journalists and public-interest users?
- Licensing OpenSanctions bulk data — this one’s for commercial use.
Get involved
EveryPolitician will be a constant work in progress. As mySociety has highlighted, identifying and managing political data is no small feat — elections are taking place around the world on a near-weekly basis, data is constantly evolving, and turning it all into reliable structured data is a daunting process.
However, we believe that transparency will be — once more — our strength. We believe that by building the right combination of strict data verification methods inside the OpenSanctions core data product, while also working with the Wikidata community to establish fun and easy-to-use methods for public review and contribution, we’ll be able to commoditise political data together.
EveryPolitician is built to be a community catalyst for turning Wikidata into the ultimate point of reference for persons-of-interest data. We’ll work to enable contributions from anyone who wants to help make political data more reliable, accessible and transparent.
Whether you have a deep understanding of the political landscape or just have a couple of minutes to double-check a statement or two, we’ve provided a breakdown here of all the ways you can help, including verifying data, adding or correcting information on Wikidata, or making open source contributions.
As ever, feel free to get in touch via the forum or GitHub if you have any questions or suggestions.
Explore EveryPolitician here!
