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, and pull comparable approaches from other countries' legislation, all from this same sourced corpus.
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.
- No endorsements. Politeia does not support or oppose any proposal, law, party or legislator; a reader's vote is that reader's view, never ours.
- Every ranked list says how it is ordered, behind a ? beside its title.
- Citizens first: no advertising, no paid placement and no selling of reader data.
The fine print, in plain language
What Politeia is and is not, how each official source may be reused, how our lists are ordered and what we store about you.
Read our legal & transparency page →