The Danish Legislator Database (DLD)

Elections determine the composition of legislatures, but the study of legislative representation has long been hampered by limited individual-level data on legislators. Recent innovations have vastly increased opportunities for studying legislators, but lack historical coverage.We introduce the Danish Legislators Database (DLD), a database of members of Denmark’s parliament, Folketinget, for every electoral term since its inception in 1849. Relative to existing databases, the DLD is unique in covering the entire history of a parliamentary body going back more than 170 years. The DLD thus enables analyses of parliamentary representation with exceptional temporal coverage.We describe the development and content of the DLD and present a set of analyses illustrating the potential uses of the database in the study of representation.