Global Leadership Project Data (v1)

This dataset is titled the Global Leadership Project (v1). The dataset provides distilled information on more than 50,000 political elites spanning 156 countries. The data covers two distinct time waves, 2010 to 2013 and 2017 to 2019, and includes individuals from 1,552 different political bodies. These bodies encompass executives, cabinets, parliamentary party groups, upper and lower legislative chambers, and supreme courts. Each leader included in the dataset is coded for several key descriptive characteristics, including their gender, ethnicity, language, and religion, along with their specific office type. The primary purpose of this data collection is to support research into descriptive representation and the demographic composition of political leadership across the globe. This dataset release accompanies the open-access research article "The Composition of Descriptive Representation" authored by John Gerring, Connor T. Jerzak, and Erzen Öncel. The article was published in the American Political Science Review in 2024, Volume 118, Issue 2, pages 784-801. It can be accessed online using the doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055423000680. The data is particularly relevant for researchers in the social sciences and political science, focusing on topics such as descriptive representation, political leadership, comparative politics, and demographics within political institutions. The data is provided in a single tabular file named GlobalLeadershipProject_v1.csv. This file is in csv format and has a size of approximately 93 MB.