About
The Global Leadership Project (GLP) provides data on government leaders throughout the world – including legislators, members of the executive branch, members of the judiciary, and other decision-makers whose power may be formal or informal. The database currently covers 162 countries and includes most countries in the world.
Mission
Power is personal. The seats of government are filled by people, each with a unique background, history, and trajectory. Before we can explain how institutions function—or fail—we have to know about the people who occupy these seats.
That’s why we created the Global Leadership Project (GLP).
GLP has one overarching purpose: a living, empirical map of the people who govern our world. Nothing more, nothing less.
Our database already canvasses 162 countries, 1,400 political bodies, and over 50,000 leaders, and growing. Legislatures, cabinets, high courts: if the office directs policy, we’ll try to track who holds it and how they got there.
We treat transparency and analytic rigor as inseparable engineering problems. Our data are open source, as are tools we’ve constructed to make sense of those data. Our goal is to democratize access to political leadership data, enabling citizens, researchers, and policymakers to better understand who holds power and downstream consequences for governance.
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Team
John Gerring, Professor
Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin, jgerring@austin.utexas.edu
Connor T. Jerzak, Assistant Professor
Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin, connor.jerzak@austin.utexas.edu
Erzen Öncel, Assistant Professor
Department of International Relations, Özyeğin University, erzen.oncel@ozyegin.edu.tr
We also thank the former Principal Investigators, Kevin M. Morrison and Pedro M. Barros, for their invaluable contribution to the GLP project.
Gerring
Öncel
Jerzak
Additional Collaborators
Allen Hicken (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Robert Moser (UT Austin)
Daniel Pemstein (North Dakota State)
Financial Support
- Clinton Global Initiative (Boston University; principal funder: Kirk Radke)
- Development Research Group (World Bank)
- Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future (Boston University)
- Cornell University
