The Global Leadership Project: A Comprehensive Database of Political Elites

This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons of research on political leaders by providing the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders of most countries in the world. Currently, GLP encompasses 145 sovereign and semisovereign nation-states and 38,085 leaders, each of whom is coded along 31 parameters, producing approximately 1.1 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. The leaders include members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and other elites whose power is of an informal nature. With this data, one can compare the characteristics of leaders within countries, across countries, and across regions. The GLP thus serves as a fundamental resource for researchers, policymakers, and citizens. In this paper, we discuss the intellectual background of the project, its core elements, and its current status. Most importantly, we also illustrate several ways in which it improves our knowledge of politics across the world, providing a new, data-informed perspective on the demographic features of the global elite, including details about gender balance, age, ethnicity, education, languages spoken, education, salary, and length in current office, among other characteristics.