abgeordnetenwatch-cli

Query Germany's parliamentary-monitoring data — politicians, mandates, votes, committees and disclosed side jobs — from your terminal. abgeordnetenwatch is a command-line tool and TypeScript client for the open abgeordnetenwatch.de API v2: list any of 18 entity collections, filter and sort them, fetch single records, count matches, and pipe the JSON straight into jq.

• Works out of the box — no account, no API key, no configuration.
• Clean JSON output — pretty-printed by default, --compact for scripting.
• Four commands — list, get, count, entities.
• Read-only, open data — the public API needs no credentials, and the data is CC0 1.0 (public domain); see DATA_LICENSE.md.

Want to use this as a TypeScript library or understand how it's built? See DEVELOPING.md. The full API reference lives in openapi.yaml.

Install

npm i -g @maschinenlesbar.org/abgeordnetenwatch-cli

This installs the abgeordnetenwatch command. Requires Node.js 20+.

abgeordnetenwatch --help
abgeordnetenwatch entities          # the 18 collections you can query

Quickstart

# How many female politicians are in the database?
abgeordnetenwatch count politicians sex=f

# Five politicians born after 1990, sorted by surname
abgeordnetenwatch list politicians 'year_of_birth[gt]=1990' \
  --sort-by last_name --range-end 5 --data-only

# Fetch one party
abgeordnetenwatch get parties 2 --data-only

# Every individual vote in poll 6569 (the data array only)
abgeordnetenwatch list votes poll=6569 --data-only | jq '.[].vote' | sort | uniq -c

Commands

| Command | What it does | |---|---| | list <entity> [filters...] | List a collection, with optional filters, --sort-by/--sort-direction, and --range-start/--range-end paging. | | get <entity> <id> | Fetch a single entity by id. | | count <entity> [filters...] | Print { entity, total } — the number of matches. | | entities | List the 18 available entity collections. |

--data-only (on list/get) prints just the data payload instead of the full { meta, data } envelope.

Filtering

Add filters as key=value arguments after the entity:

• Equality: sex=f, year_of_birth=1980

• Related entity by id: politician=184945, poll=6569

• Comparison operators — field[op]=value with op one of eq, ne, gt, gte, lt, lte, cn (contains), sw (starts-with): 'year_of_birth[gt]=1990', 'last_name[sw]=Mü'

  (Quote any filter containing [ ] so your shell doesn't glob it.)

Paging

--range-end is the page size (number of items). The API honours it up to 1000; a value above 1000 is ignored and the API falls back to its default page size of 100. Use --range-start to offset into the next page; count reports the true total.

Entities

parliaments, parliament-periods, politicians, candidacies-mandates, committees, committee-memberships, polls, votes, parties, fractions, election-program, electoral-lists, constituencies, sidejobs, sidejob-organizations, topics, cities, countries.

See openapi.yaml for every field of every entity.

Global options

--base-url <url>, --timeout <ms>, --user-agent <ua>, --max-retries <n> (transient 429/503), --max-response-bytes <n>, --compact.

The service rate-limits bursts with HTTP 429; the client retries these automatically. Sending a descriptive --user-agent is appreciated by the provider.

Exit codes

0 success · 1 runtime/network/server error · 2 usage error (unknown entity, bad option/filter) · 4 HTTP 404 (unknown collection path).

Note: the API returns HTTP 500 (not 404) for a missing id; the CLI surfaces the reason from meta.status_message and exits 1.

License

Code: AGPL-3.0-or-later or a commercial license. Data: CC0 1.0 by abgeordnetenwatch.de — see DATA_LICENSE.md.