dc-candidates

name	dc-candidates
description	Query DemocracyClub Candidates — the canonical list of UK electoral candidates (past, present, declared) with stable IDs, party affiliations, and sources. Use when the question is who stood (or is standing) for a seat at a given election, what the candidate's history is across seats, or to enumerate every candidate at a given general election. Joins to Parliament via Westminster constituency name + general-election date. Free JSON API; no auth.
license	Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (DemocracyClub)
metadata	{"facility":"dc-candidates","cli-alias":"candidates","base-url":"https://candidates.democracyclub.org.uk/api/next","provenance":{"tier":3,"operator":"DemocracyClub","service":"candidates.democracyclub.org.uk","upstream-data":"Crowd-sourced and party-supplied candidate data, fact-checked by DC volunteers","citation-short":"via DemocracyClub Candidates","citation-formal":"DemocracyClub Candidates database, retrieved {date}, CC BY-SA 4.0","confidence":"derived","confidence-notes":"Crowd-sourced with strong sourcing discipline. Each statement on a person record carries a `source_url`. Recent / declared candidates are well-covered; pre-2015 has gaps."}}

DemocracyClub Candidates

Base URL: https://candidates.democracyclub.org.uk/api/next/

Core resources

Resource	What it is
ballot	One election × one electoral area — e.g. "Holborn and St Pancras, 2024 general election". Has a ballot_paper_id like parl.holborn-and-st-pancras.2024-07-04.
person	One candidate identity, persistent across the elections they've contested. DC person id is the canonical key.
election	The umbrella event (e.g. parl.2024-07-04 general election).
post	The electoral area (e.g. "Holborn and St Pancras").
party	A registered party as DC records it.

CLI

parl candidates ballots --election-date 2024-07-04 --take 5
parl candidates ballot parl.holborn-and-st-pancras.2024-07-04
parl candidates persons --name "Cooper"
parl candidates person 1196                       # one candidate's full history
parl candidates elections --election-date 2024-07-04
parl candidates parties

Joins to Parliament

• DC ballot post.label ≈ Westminster constituency name
• The winner's person.id doesn't directly equal a Parliament member id, but you can name-match via parl members search --name "<full name>" (same chain as APPG).
• For canonical cross-IDs, prefer the wikidata bridge (Wikidata has P3640 = DemocracyClub person id, P5388 = Parliament MP id).

Provenance to cite

Tier 3 — third-party (DemocracyClub).

• Inline cite: "(via DemocracyClub Candidates)" — once per paragraph.
• Each DC person record has versions[] showing the edit history and source_url for each change. For a high-stakes statement, cite the underlying source URL on the version that established it, not just DC.
• Pre-2015 coverage is patchy.
• See ../../docs/provenance.md.