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Comment by thomasfoster96 | Hacker News Reader

233 countries? It would be much better to organise the data in some sort of heirarchy, given having the UK, Wales and Scotland all on the list is somewhat confusing (and it leaves out US and Australian state legislatures).

Also, I'm wondering how the data was collected - the party affiliation information for the Australian parliament is very strange. Not entirely wrong, but probably misleading.

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> having the UK, Wales and Scotland all on the list is somewhat confusing

Why? UK is comprised of countries with their own legislatures (with devolved and varying powers). England doesn't. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have parliaments, and their own politicians so need an entry. They all elect MPs to the Westminster UK parliament as well. Just as all these areas elect EU MEPs too.

CGP Grey explains UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

Sure, but the Australian and US States similarly have parliaments with strong jurisdictions - stronger than those of the Scotland, Wales and NI parliaments, because the national legislatures in the federations have only limited scope.

I am aware of the UK having sub-national parliaments - my point is that the US has more than 50 legislatures and both Australia and Canada have around 10 each. Are these legislatures also going to be stuffed into the list, or will the legislatures be browseable in some form of heirarchy?

> CGP Grey explains UK

He has another on why "how many countries are there?" is a difficult question [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+many+countr...

> the party affiliation information for the Australian parliament is very strange. Not entirely wrong, but probably misleading.

For Australia we get our information primary from http://www.openaustralia.org.au/ — if you can give any pointers to where things are wrong, we can correct them.

And if you want more information about Members and Senators for Australia you can get a CSV with way more data over at: http://www.aph.gov.au/senators_and_members under "Contacting Senators and Members". I used that dataset to build a very incomplete project called http://reviewmy.mp as a way to learn Phoenix/Elixir. The data is missing a bit but the search results[0] have everything else and it's scrapable!

0: http://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian_S...

For starters the speaker and deputy speaker of each chamber are listed as being not being in their own parties, which isn't true (although it is in the U.K.), instead they have strange abbreviations for the name of the position.

Secondly, in Australia the Liberal National Party is a partial merger of the Liberal and National parties. MPs in the LNP can be a member of either the Liberals or Nationals. In the House of Representatives data for Australia, the breakdown of LNP MPs between the two parties is incorrect, and leaves one MP as a sole member of the LNP. The errors are similar in the Senate data.

Additionally, two politicians (Bob Katter and Jacqui Lambie) are wrongly shown as being independents, despite being elected as the sole member of a party.

Thanks! I've checked in case any of this is our screwup with how we're importing the data, but it turns out that all of these are like this in our source (http://data.openaustralia.org/members/representatives.xml), which is going to make it a little tricky to unpack. I'll talk to the guys from OpenAustralia next week when everyone's back at work and see if we can get them to fix these upstream, otherwise we'll look into ways of working around them.

With the Liberal National Party is this a distinction between the electoral party and the parliamentary party? i.e. do people stand for election as one of Liberal or National, but then sit in a group as a single Liberal National Party? Or do they each sit as members of distinct parties which are, in turn, in coalition?

Or, from another angle, what would you expect to see within our data: a combined "Liberal National Party" for each person (with a separate field to show which party they stood for election as), or individual "Liberal Party" and "National Party" affiliations at the MP level, with the coalition shown at a party/term level?

The Liberal National Party is electoral only at the national level, but parliamentary at the state level (Queensland). In the other states the Liberals and Nationals are only in an electoral alliance and parliamentary coalition, and haven't actually merged, so LNP politicians are split into the Liberal and National parties. The Country Liberal Party is similar to the LNP, but it only operates in the Northern Territory and its only Senator sits with the Nationals.

Wikipedia shows LNP MPs as being a part of the LNP, with a note stating their affiliation.

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