BRÉF - Base Révisée des Élu·es de France

The BRÉF (Base Révisée des Élu·es de France / Revised database of representatives elected in France) is a database aiming at describing the mandates of all public representatives elected in France during the Fifth Republic (1958--present). It is based on the combination of data coming from of 4 sources:

• Primary source: RNE (Registre National des Elus / National register of elected representatives), a database maintained by the French Ministry of Interior when monitoring elections.
• Secondary sources:
  • National Assembly: open database provided by the French National Assembly regarding the mandates of Members of the Parliament.
  • Senate: open database provided by the French Senate, regarding senatorial mandates.
  • European Parliament: official website of the European Parliament, which lists the mandates of Members of the European Parliament.

The original data contain many errors and issues, which are documented in our technical report (in French), as well as the operations that we conducted to correct or alleviate them, as described in technical report [1]. The database was used during the PhD of Noémie Févrat [2].

1. V. Labatut, N. Févrat & G. Marrel, BRÉF – Base de données Révisée des Élu·es de France, Technical Report, Avignon Université, 2020. ⟨hal-02886580⟩
2. Févrat, N. Le mandat de trop ? La réélection des parlementaires et des maires en France et les conditions de sa remise en cause, PhD Thesis, Avignon Université, 2024. ⟨tel-04550896⟩

Source code. The source code that implements these operations is freely available on GitHub, as a collection of R scripts gathered in the BrefInit repository. The first version of the database takes the form of a single, large CSV table. The second version of the BRÉF is a proper relational database obtained with the scripts available in the BrefConversion repository. Its tables and fields are described in the readme.txt file.

Database. The database is available under three forms:

• PostgreSQL binary dump: file bref_20250115_v2.2.1.backup
• SQL plain dump: file bref_20250115_v2.2.1_sql.zip
• Individual CSV files (one by table): bref_20250115_v2.2.1_sql.zip

Citation. If you use these data or the related source code, please cite reference [1]:

@TechReport{Labatut2020,
  author           = {Labatut, Vincent and Févrat, Noémie and Marrel, Guillaume},
  title            = {{BRÉF} -- {B}ase de données {R}évisée des {É}lu·es de {F}rance (BRÉF -- Revised Database of the Representatives Elected in {F}rance)},
  institution      = {Avignon Université},
  year             = {2020},
  type             = {Technical Report},
  address          = {Avignon, FR},
}

Funding. This work was supported by the research federation Agorantic (FR 3621), through the funding of Noémie Fevrat’s PhD. and of interdisciplinary research project BRÉF2.