Measuring the name recognition of politicians through Wikipedia

We examine how Wikipedia data can be useful for political analysis. Our primary aim is to determine whether Wikipedia page views can be used as a strong proxy for name recognition. Name recognition is an important variable for political science research, but conducting surveys to discover the name recognition of politicians can be cost prohibitive for many researchers. To help researchers overcome this obstacle, we conducted a survey of Czech citizens asking them if they knew each of the 200 members of the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic. Then, we downloaded Wikipedia page information on these deputies. We found that name recognition is strongly correlated with page views on Wikipedia. The more well-known deputies have significantly higher page views on Wikipedia. We recommend that political science researchers requiring an appropriate proxy for name recognition use the free Wikimedia API, which offers page information data.