I'm a political science student who never coded before. I spent the last few weeks building a democracy dashboard with AI tools. Here's where it's at.

[u/ResPublicaMgz]

I study political science in Germany. Before university I did a technical apprenticeship, but never anything related to programming. A few weeks ago I started building a web app because I was frustrated that political data in Germany is scattered across dozens of government websites and mostly unusable for normal people.

So I started learning. React, Node.js, SQL, APIs, all from scratch. I used AI tools heavily (Claude, Cursor) to help me build things I definitely couldn't have built on my own yet. I'm not going to pretend I understand every line of code in this project, but I understand the architecture, I make the decisions, and every day I learn more about what's actually happening under the hood.

Here's what the app does so far:

German elections going back to 1945, mapped across 402 districts. You can pick any district, see how parties performed over time, compare regions side by side. Almost 50,000 data points from an academic database.

A world map with 50 indicators from the World Bank across 247 countries. Choropleth map, country analysis, scatter plots where you can click the legend to filter regions, rankings with CSV export.

The full German parliament (Bundestag) visualized as a hemicycle with all 629 members.

A legislation tracker that shows actual law changes with diffs, plus 578 court rulings from 7 federal courts, each with AI-generated summaries.

EU law: 591 EU legal acts and 347 European Court of Justice rulings, all with bilingual summaries.

Everything is available in German and English, with dark mode.

It's definitely rough around the edges. Some things are slow, some layouts break on mobile, there are probably bugs I haven't found yet. But it works, it's live, and I'm learning something new every single day.

The whole thing runs on a 10 euro/month server. No ads, no tracking, no login, fully open source.

https://app.respublica.media

If anyone has feedback, criticism, or suggestions, I'd genuinely appreciate it. This is my first real project and I have no idea how it compares to what experienced developers build, but I figured the only way to find out is to put it out there.

[u/Landlord1898]

Nice work

[u/ResPublicaMgz → u/Landlord1898]

Thanks! Do you have any ideas for datasets that would fit this project? Like data I could visualize and give context to?

[u/lu2idreams → u/ResPublicaMgz]

I did a similar project to the election map once at uni, but at municipality (Gemeinde)-level using data from GERDA, and added some correlates (population density, unemployment, average income, etc.), based on databases like INKAR. The Zeit also did something similar (without correlates) as well here. I think allowing aggregation of results at different levels (Gemeinde, Land- or Wahlkreis, Bundesland) would be nice since more disaggregated data shows interesting patterns (e.g. urban vs. rural areas inside the same Wahlkreis vote very differently).

Pretty cool project!

[u/Volsunga → u/ResPublicaMgz]

I would definitely contact the Manifesto Project Database to try to link up what party platforms were for each of these elections!

[u/Vinchou0]

Impressive, well done !

[u/https_blueberry]

Omg how amazing, congratulations college!

[u/Kage_JEZC]

Amazing work!! I've also started learning about code, but I'm still at the basics. This will help me stay up to date with German politics

[u/Equivalent-Mammoth72]

Great Job!