Replication Data for: The Comparative Legislators Database

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.