Measuring Political Elite Networks with Wikidata Omer F. Yalcin Pennsylvania State University

Substantive Problem Solution: Wikidata Political elites: people who can substantially and Wikidata is a central storage for the structured For each country: Authoritarian regimes often have a trust regularly influence political outcomes in a data of Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia. I query instances of humans, who problem, which can lead to denser kinship country [1]. I machine readable I are citizens of the country in question connections among the country’s political elites. the groups that constitute elites differ I collaborative: editable by humans and were born after Jan 1. 1900 I I Figure shows Polity scores vs. (log) of density of substantially across countries machines have held a “position,” I kinship networks. I can be members of parliament, military I multilingual language independent I where the position is in the same country personnel, business people, clergy and so on I graph database Figure 5: Polity Scores and Kinship I most scholars study only a country/region (e.g. I information stored in item–property–value Figure 3: Kennedy Family China, West Africa), a certain institution (e.g. triplets Austria Germany Canada Sweden Japan Slovak Republic Trinidad and Tobago 10 ● ●● ● ● ● ● ●●●● ● ●●●Ireland● ● ●● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● the parliament), or specific types of regimes Figure 2: Data Storage in Wikidata Patrick J. Kennedy ● Italy Poland ● ● ● ●● ●● ● ●● ●● Guatemala●● Myanmar (Burma) France ● ● ● ● ● ●South●● ● Africa● ● ● ● ● ● ● Lithuania SenegalNepal Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Latvia● ● ● ● ● ●● ● ●● ●● Lesotho (e.g. presidential systems, single party regimes, United States Lebanon Ted Kennedy ● Pakistan● Tunisia● ● ● ● ●● ● John F. Kennedy 5 Israel Ecuador●● ● ● ● Mozambique etc.) Edward M. Kennedy, Jr. ●Ukraine● ● Russia Niger Somalia Haiti ● Zimbabwe Tanzania ●● Robert F. Kennedy Algeria 0 Uganda ● Afghanistan Data & Method Problem ● ●

Polity IV score (2018) Polity Thailand Togo ●Venezuela Jordan ● Congo Kinshasa Often, relationships of interest also differ across ● ● ● ● ● Cambodia● ● ●● Morocco

Turkey ● Kathleen Kennedy Townsend −5 Congo Brazzaville Cameroon countries. ● ● Bangladesh Cuba Joseph P. Kennedy II ● ● ● ● Equatorial Guinea China Vietnam Iran Azerbaijan kinship ties are more important in some Syria I items are linked to other items ● I ● ● −10 countries than others Joe Kennedy III Bahrain Saudi Arabia makes possible weird, specific queries that we −12 −8 −4 I Log. Density of the Kinship Network I attendance at an elite school wouldn’t have thought before collecting the I ethnic ties, shared religion. data Challenges any combination of these Figure 4: I I Which countries’ capital cities have a mayor I we can only know as much as Wikidata knows We don’t know what to look for before studying younger than forty? anyone can edit, so, prone to errors Salbiah binti Haji I these. Questions come along through study. Suyoi bin Osman I Who are the US presidents born in hospitals I also prone to missing data Figure 1: Wikidata.org named after women? Lim Jock Seng Crown Prince Al−Muhtadee Billah of Brunei Potential Remedies Application: Dynastic Politics Prince Mohamed I every item’s edit history is available. One type of relationship that can be queried I includes total number of edits, number of with Wikidata is kinship ties. unique editors, the age of the item/statement I These relationships are instances of the item Omar Ali Saifuddien III of Brunei etc. ”Wikidata property for human relationships” of Brunei I can be used as a measure of reliability of a (Q22964231), and include ”father,” ”mother,” piece of information ”spouse,” ”child,” ”sibling,” ”relative,” John Higley and Michael Burton. Elite foundations of liberal democracy. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006. Contact [email protected]