Who Represents the World? Database Profiles 20,000 Legislators in 97 Democracies

New Resource: The Global Legislators Database (GLD)

Nick Carnes, Miriam Golden, Noam Lupu, Eugenia Nazrullaeva, and Joshua Ferrer introduce the GLD, a new cross-national dataset that compiles biographical and demographic information on nearly 20,000 national parliamentarians serving in the world’s electoral democracies. The database is intended as a one-of-a-kind resource for scholars of representation, parties, and legislative politics.

What the GLD Contains

• Coverage: 97 electoral democracies and nearly 20,000 legislators who held seats in each country’s lower or unicameral chamber during one legislative session in 2015, 2016, or 2017.
• Individual attributes: party affiliation, gender, age, education, and occupational background—allowing consistent cross-national comparisons of who sits in legislatures.

How the Database Was Built and Assessed

The authors describe the data collection and coding process for assembling the GLD and report multiple validity checks to document data integrity. These checks are used to ensure consistency and to assess the reliability of key variables across countries. The paper provides documentation that helps users understand coverage, coding rules, and known limitations.

Previewed Applications

Carnes et al. outline three illustrative ways researchers can use the GLD and emphasize a broader set of potential projects, including:

• Comparative analyses of descriptive representation (e.g., gender and age patterns across democracies).
• Studies linking legislator backgrounds to party composition and institutional contexts.
• Investigations of recruitment and career paths into national legislatures.

Why This Matters

The GLD is the largest individual-level biographical dataset on national legislators assembled to date, offering researchers and policy analysts a standardized foundation for studying who governs in democracies, how representative legislatures are, and how legislator attributes vary with institutional and electoral contexts. The paper’s documentation and validity checks aim to make the GLD accessible and trustworthy for a wide range of comparative research agendas.