---
name: political-party-membership
description: Retrieve current Estonian political-party and member lists from the e-Business Register, including direct CSV exports by registry code.
module: erakonnad.mjs
execution: code
---

# Political Party Membership

Party membership is public under the Political Parties Act, and the
e-Business Register publishes each party's current member list as a CSV export.
No authentication, no session cookie.

## Use when
- You need how large a party is, or how the parties compare.
- You need to check whether a named person is on a party's public list.
- **Not** for campaign finance — that is `party-funding-data`.

## Retrieve

**Use the module below.** It resolves the party, downloads the register's own
CSV and counts in code.

```js
const r = await partyMembership("Reformierakond");
show(r.totals);       // { members, suspended, byJoinYear, joinedThisYear, longestServing }

const all = await partyMembershipRanking();   // every registered party, one call
show(all.totals);     // { parties, members, largest }
show(all.rows);       // party, members, sharePct
```

`partyMembershipRanking()` downloads all 14 registered parties (~1.8 MB, ~6 s)
and ranks them, so a "which party is biggest" question needs no second call and
no hand-added subtotals.

## What `byJoinYear` is, and is not

It counts **how many of today's members joined in each year**. It is *not* the
party's membership in that year: everyone who has since left is absent, so the
series slopes downward into the past for reasons that have nothing to do with
recruitment. The register holds **no leave dates at all**. State what the series
measures, or say nothing about the trend — this is the caveat the module's
`note` repeats because it is the easiest wrong graph to draw here.

## Personal data

The default answer is a **count**. Personal rows come back only from
`partyMemberCheck(party, name)`, i.e. when the question is about a named person,
and even then only the **birth year** — the register publishes the full date and
a year is enough to tell two people apart. Never republish a bulk member list
when an aggregate answers the question.

## Limits

- The register publishes no count, only the list, and one live party's export is
  a third of a megabyte — so the counting has to happen in code, and plain
  requests are not enough here: they would put nearly nine thousand people's
  names in front of you instead of the number you asked for.
- The chooser lists **two** tables: `registrisse kantud` (14 live parties) and
  `registrist kustutatud` (17 struck off). They are not distinguished by markup,
  only by the heading between them — counting them together doubles Estonia's
  parties. `politicalParties()` returns `status` per row.
- A struck-off party exports an **empty** member list. That is the register's
  answer, not a failed download.
- The export is a snapshot taken at request time; report `retrievedAt`.
- Historical aggregates live in a Power BI page
  (`https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/statistics/political_parties`) that only
  renders in a browser.

## Verify

The CSV must arrive as `text/csv` with the register's own header — `First
name;Last name;Date of birth;Date of starting membership;Suspension of
membership in political party`, semicolon-delimited, UTF-8 with BOM. The module
throws when that header is missing, which is what tells a real empty list from
an HTML error page.


## Module API
partyMembership(party) -> {source, page, party, regCode, status, retrievedAt, totals, note}
partyMembershipRanking() -> {source, page, retrievedAt, totals, rows, note}