parteisid

Parteisid is a term used in political data management to refer to stable identifiers assigned to political parties in electoral databases, legislative records, and archival datasets. The identifiers are designed to stay constant across changes to party names, acronyms, or leadership, enabling reliable linking of records over time and across different jurisdictions.

Formation and maintenance

IDs are typically created by election authorities, parliamentary administrations, or standardized data repositories. They can be alphanumeric (for example P-001) or purely numeric, and may include regional or temporal hints in their structure. Assignment often follows official party registration or recognized parliamentary groupings, and IDs are updated only when a party undergoes formal changes such as a merger, split, dissolution, or rebranding. Effective use of parteisid is usually accompanied by metadata, including the current official party name, short names or acronyms, country, and active dates, as well as historical aliases and past IDs for traceability.

Applications

Parteisid are used to organize and integrate data across elections, seating arrangements in legislatures, party groupings in parliaments, and media or scholarly databases. They support longitudinal research, cross-dataset reconciliation, and international comparisons by providing a stable reference point for a party despite name changes or reorganizations.

Challenges

Challenges include correctly handling mergers, splits, or dissolutions while preserving historical records, aligning national IDs with international registries, and maintaining governance and versioning policies to avoid ambiguity.

See also

Related concepts include political party, election data standard, and data provenance.