About Politeia
Why we're building a source-first record of how countries legislate.
Why we exist
Laws are public documents, but reading them across countries means fighting a dozen different official portals, formats, and languages. Politeia is one place to read what a legislature actually did — sourced, dated, and traceable back to the government that published it.
The problem with following legislation
Most people only hear about a law once it is already controversial, filtered through a headline that has no room for the text itself. Journalists rebuild the same research — finding the bill, the vote, the prior version — country by country, from scratch. And the countries that already solved a problem you're facing are rarely the first place anyone looks. Politeia exists to close those three gaps with one record.
How Politeia works today
Source-first, always
Every law, proposal, and legislator record traces back to an official government publication — a gazette, a chamber's own registry, a parliament's bill tracker. We link to it; we don't paraphrase it as if it were the text.
Evidence, graded and separated
Claims about whether a policy "worked" are graded by source quality and kept visibly apart from the official text itself — a summary is never mistaken for the law, and a claim is never mistaken for a fact.
Built to compare, not just list
The same policy problem — rent control, carbon pricing, pretrial detention — usually has several countries' worth of attempts already on the record. Politeia is structured so those attempts sit side by side.
Corrections need a citation
Readers can add evidence, arguments, and corrections to any record — but a contribution needs a source before it can be posted. Nothing enters the record on the strength of an opinion alone.
What we're building next
For citizens and journalists
Deeper investigative tooling: tracking a legislator's full record over time, following a bill's citation trail through the laws it amends, and surfacing the cross-country comparisons a story needs in minutes instead of days.
For legislative offices
A working tool for the people drafting the next bill: see exactly which existing statutes a proposal touches and what it links to, then bring in an AI research agent — grounded in this same sourced corpus — to debate the draft from multiple angles, surface gaps and counterarguments, and pull comparable approaches from other countries' legislation.
What we won't compromise on
- Official sources only — nothing in the record is invented or guessed.
- AI-generated text (like summaries or translations) is always labelled as such and never presented as the official text.
- A gap in our coverage is shown as a gap, never quietly filled with a plausible-looking zero.
- No partisan ranking, anywhere — party and country data are counts, never endorsements.