http://yournextmep.com/ is a more rounded project with better links to other resources like Wikipedia. If you're interested in MEP's address data, or you want to see which companies they are directors of then read on...
##Intro
On Thursday 22nd May 2014, voters in the UK will head to their polling station to cast their votes for the European Parliament. For the larger parties, voters might be aware of their candidates from the familiar leaflets through the door but for smaller groups, let's say the "Pirate Party" in the North West, it's not viable to flyer an entire region.
This fact, combined with the parlous state of the regional press in the UK, means that often voters will be reading many candidates names for the first time as they receive their voting slip. I for one think this is a poor state of affairs and bad for democracy in this country.
Using pdf scraping techniques, I've collated the entire set of 2014 UK MEP hopefuls into a JSON file, based on information provided by the European Parliament.
The source for the data is here: http://www.europarl.org.uk/en/european_elections/candidates2014.html
As an example of what you can do with this, I've ran the name of every UK MEP candidate through the OpenCorporates API to see who among them are directors of UK companies. The results are a little rough as many candidates don't give their full legal name, but it has yielded thousands of results. They're viewable as csvs in the folder above. (NB I work for OpenCorporates, but this research is my own).
- UKIP's Dianne Martin James (South East) - Director of "BLACK & WHITE CONSULTING"
- UKIP's Nigel Farage (South East) - Director of "THORN IN THE SIDE LIMITED"
- 760 candidates
- 44 parties
- name
- address
- party
- party slogan (varies by region)
- region
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