The Global Leadership Project: A Comprehensive Database of Political Elites

Abstract

Contributing to the recent revival in studies of the effects of the biographical characteristics of leaders, this paper presents an attempt at the most complete description to date of the world’s current leaders. The Global Leadership Project (GLP) provides the first dataset offering biographical information on leaders of most countries in the world, including members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and other elites whose power is of an informal nature. GLP encompasses 146 sovereign and semisovereign nation-states and 40,566 leaders, each of whom is coded along 33 parameters, producing approximately 1.2 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. This paper describes the coding process and the resulting data, and compares the characteristics of leaders across offices within countries, across countries, and across regions.

Keywords: leaders, data