The Comparative Legislators Database

Abstract Knowledge about political representatives' behavior is crucial for a deeper understanding of politics and policy-making processes. Yet resources on legislative elites are scattered, often specialized, limited in scope or not always accessible. This article introduces the Comparative Legislators Database (CLD), which joins micro-data collection efforts open-collaboration platforms other sources, integrates with renowned science datasets. The CLD includes political, sociodemographic, career, online presence, public attention, visual information over 45,000 contemporary historical politicians from ten countries. authors provide straightforward open-source interface to database through an R package, offering targeted, fast analysis-ready access formats familiar social scientists standardized across time space. data verified against human-coded datasets, its use investigating legislator prominence turnover illustrated. contributes central hub versatile legislators their behavior, supporting individual-level comparative research long periods.