Access Bulk Elected Official Data for 9 Countries through the Cicero API
We’re excited to introduce the new Officials by Region resource to the Cicero API, which enables flexible access to contact information for thousands of elected officials in nine different countries. Read on to learn how you can make use of this data in your application or campaign.
Why we did this: a very brief history
Ten years ago, Cicero began as a straightforward address to district matching service. As the product of a geospatial software company, our initial goal centered around political geography: we wanted to build the most accurate way to match an address to a legislative district. Since then, we’ve grown to be a comprehensive database of elected official and legislative district data at the National, State, and local levels in 9 countries.
We’ve seen our user base grow from smaller nonprofits, to national and global efforts on both the commercial and not for profit sides. While it was always uniquely helpful to be able to match any location to legislative districts, the need for corresponding elected official data has increased as organizations run advocacy campaigns throughout the world’s democracies. Over the past year, specifically, we’ve heard from our users that they’d like a more flexible way to access our elected official data in bulk. For that reason, we’ve recently deployed a new resource within the Cicero API called Officials by Region.
How it works
Officials by Region will return elected official data for a full chamber, or even multiple chambers in one API call, instead of matching to an individual address. Say you’re building a campaign that targets statewide elected officials in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. You could construct the following query:
/v3.1/officials_by_region?district_type=STATE_LOWER&district_type=STATE_UPPER&country=US&state=PA&state=NJ
This will return all 373 elected officials in the state assembly/house and state senate in both PA and NJ.
Alternately, maybe you’d like to target all of the Provincial MPPs in Ontario, as well as the local councilors in Toronto and Ottawa (or any of the 400+ localities for which we maintain local data). You could build this query to return information about all 172 of those officials as well:
/v3.1/officials_by_region?district_type=STATE_LOWER&district_type=LOCAL&country=CA&state=ON&city=Toronto&city=Ottawa
Officials by Region will return name, party, primary contact information, and major social media identifiers for all of the officials that match your query, giving you the opportunity to access a broader swath of information. This could be useful if you’re building an advocacy application or platform, if you’re running outreach or action-focused campaigns, or if you’d like to display elected officials on a website.
We hope this feature will help promote meaningful civic discourse by providing flexible access to bulk information about elected officials. To learn more about this new resource check out our documentation or get in touch.
