TY - RPRT A1 - Göbel, Sascha A1 - Munzert, Simon T1 - The Comparative Legislators Database T2 - SocArXiv Papers N2 - 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. This article introduces 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. The authors 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. The data is verified against human-coded datasets, and its use for investigating legislator prominence and turnover is illustrated. The CLD contributes to a central hub for versatile information about legislators and their behavior, supporting individual-level comparative research over long periods. KW - comparative KW - Crowdsourcing KW - dataset Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/kapfq ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Göbel, Sascha A1 - Munzert, Simon T1 - The Comparative Legislators Database JF - British Journal of Political Science N2 - 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. This article introduces 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. The authors 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. The data is verified against human-coded datasets, and its use for investigating legislator prominence and turnover is illustrated. The CLD contributes to a central hub for versatile information about legislators and their behavior, supporting individual-level comparative research over long periods. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123420000897 SN - 0007-1234 N1 - Published online 23 February 2021 Göbel, S., & Munzert, S. (2022). The Comparative Legislators Database. British Journal of Political Science, 52(3), 1398–1408. doi:10.1017/S0007123420000897 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Göbel, Sascha A1 - Munzert, Simon T1 - Political Advertising on the Wikipedia Marketplace of Information JF - Social Science Computer Review N2 - We point to a popular yet underresearched platform of political information, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Considering the supply side of the marketplace, we argue that personal biographies on the platform are an attractive medium for politicians to enhance their appearance. We trace changes to biographies coming from the parliament using data that cover the entire edit histories for biographies on all German members of parliament for the three last legislative periods. Our findings show editing of personal biographies to be a persistent phenomenon. Moreover, type, timing, and driving factors of editing behavior highlight the importance politicians’ attribute to Wikipedia for pursuing reelection. Our results speak to the domains of political professionalization, voting behavior, and the general measurement of communicative patterns. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439317703579 VL - 36 IS - 2 SP - 157 EP - 175 ER -