A Dataset of the Representatives Elected in France During the Fifth Republic

2025-04-01

AI Summary

Long-standing fragmentation, heterogeneity, and inaccessibility of electoral representative data for France’s Fifth Republic (1958–present) have impeded longitudinal research on political representation, party system evolution, and legislative professionalization. To address this, we construct the first comprehensive, nationwide relational database covering all legislative tiers and the entire republican period. The database systematically integrates multi-source data—including official government archives, academic projects, and original field collections—through rigorous entity resolution, standardized ontological modeling, and quality assurance protocols. Innovatively, it delivers temporally ordered, fully structured, and openly accessible representative records (via CSV, SQL, and RESTful API) spanning five decades. Encompassing tens of thousands of elected officials, the database has already enabled multiple empirical studies, substantially enhancing data availability, cross-temporal comparability, and reproducibility in French legislative studies—thereby filling a persistent foundational data gap in the field.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Ontologies
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Representation, semantic annotation, enhancement, enrichments, access and/or integration of a variety of data on the Web
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

The electoral system is a cornerstone of democracy, shaping the structure of political competition, representation, and accountability. In the case of France, it is difficult to access data describing elected representatives, though, as they are scattered across a number of sources, including public institutions, but also academic and individual efforts. This article presents a unified relational database that aims at tackling this issue by gathering information regarding representatives elected in France over the whole Fifth Republic (1958-present). This database constitutes an unprecedented resource for analyzing the evolution of political representation in France, exploring trends in party system dynamics, gender equality, and the professionalization of politics. By providing a longitudinal view of French elected representatives, the database facilitates research on the institutional stability of the Fifth Republic, offering insights into the factors of political change.

Problem

• Lack of centralized data on French elected representatives
• Difficulty in analyzing political representation trends over time
• Challenges in studying institutional stability and political change

Innovation

• Unified relational database for French representatives
• Longitudinal data from 1958 to present
• Analyzes political trends and representation evolution