rossigab/the-long-register

The Long Register

Office-holding records for the 47 states of geographic Europe, from each state's foundation to the present — including the ~350 dissolved predecessor states that "since the birth of the country" actually requires (Kingdom of England, Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Austria–Hungary, USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Holy Roman Empire, …).

One row per mandate — (person × position × term). A politician who held five cabinet posts is five rows. Primary key: statement_id (the Wikidata statement GUID). Derived from Wikidata via the QLever SPARQL endpoint by a fully open pipeline; refreshed monthly.

• 813,039 mandates (511,969 national + supranational)
• 250,846 distinct national/supranational office-holders
• temporal extent: antiquity → present
• every row carries source_url, fetched_at, processing_version

Quick start

import polars as pl
df = pl.read_parquet("hf://datasets/rossigab/the-long-register/mandates.parquet")
df.filter((pl.col("country") == "PL") & (pl.col("level") == "national"))

-- DuckDB, straight over HTTP
SELECT person_name, position, start_date, end_date
FROM 'https://huggingface.co/datasets/rossigab/the-long-register/resolve/main/mandates.parquet'
WHERE country = 'PL' AND level = 'national'
  AND start_year <= 1935 AND (end_year >= 1935 OR end_year IS NULL);

Read this before you use it

• Coverage is Wikidata's coverage. Strong for heads of state/government in all periods and post-1945 legislatures; thin for earlier legislatures and uneven between countries. Absence of a row is not evidence an office was vacant.
• Filter to level IN ('national','supranational') for the headline population; subnational (mayors, regional councillors) is included for completeness only.
• party_labels is person-level, not term-level. Use parliamentary_group for term-accurate affiliation.
• Multinational polities carry a primary successor in country and every successor in countries_all; aggregate on countries_all to avoid undercounting.
• Pre-1582 dates are proleptic; treat pre-modern dates as year-precision. Filter on start_year/end_year (signed integers, negative = BCE).
• jurisdiction_link = 'P1001' marks the high-precision subset.

Full schema in schema.json; deterministic validation findings are published, not hidden — see the project site and repository.

Links

• Website: https://milziade21.github.io/the-long-register/
• Pipeline, validation rules, issues: https://github.com/Milziade21/the-long-register
• Citable releases (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22236882

Citation

Rossi, G. (2026). The Long Register: European political mandates since state
foundation [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22236882

License: CC0-1.0 (Wikidata is CC0). Attribution appreciated; credit Wikidata as the upstream source.