3.09M speeches across eight legislatures.

License

ParlLawSpeech is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Data lives in the GESIS Data Archive for permanent open access.

File formats

Each per-country file ships as .RDS (R native). Users in other environments can convert via R packages such as haven, feather, or arrow, or load the files in Python through pyreadr.

The linking key

Each record carries identifiers that link a speech to the bill under discussion and, where applicable, the law eventually enacted. This is the core innovation of PLS over earlier corpora — see tutorials for worked examples.

Data structure

For each of the eight legislatures, ParlLawSpeech ships three data files — one for bills, one for laws, one for plenary speeches — joined by the procedure_ID linking key. Core variables for each file:

Corpus_bills_[country].RDS · legislative bills tabled in the parliament

title_bill

Bill title as provided in the original parliamentary archive.

bill_ID

Identification number of the bill, following the conventions of the respective parliament.

bill_text

Full text of the bill.

initiation_date

Day on which the bill was tabled.

status

Final decision of the legislative body on the bill.

procedure_ID

Unique ParlLawSpeech identifier linking bills, speeches, and laws.

Corpus_laws_[country].RDS · laws finally adopted by the parliament

title_law

Title of the law as provided in the original archive.

law_ID

Identifier of the law text as used in the respective parliament or the official legislation database of the country.

law_text

Full text of the law.

adoption_date

Day on which the law was published.

procedure_ID

Unique ParlLawSpeech identifier linking bills, speeches, and laws.

Corpus_speeches_[country].RDS · plenary speeches in the parliament (chronological)

agenda

Agenda item under which the speech was given (per the conventions of the respective parliament).

date

Day on which the speech was given (YYYY-MM-DD).

party

Party and/or partisan faction of the speaker.

speaker

Name of the person having given the plenary speech.

text

Full text of the speech.

speechnumber

Unique speech ID with session reflecting chronological order.

procedure_ID

Unique ParlLawSpeech identifier linking bills, speeches, and laws (NA for speeches not directly tied to a specific procedure).

All variables are UTF-8 strings unless otherwise indicated. The full codebook ships with the dataset on GESIS. Several country files include additional variables — large shares of the European Parliament and Hungarian speeches come with English translations alongside the original-language text.

Files in the repository

The dataset compiles as .RDS files for the R environment. Users working in other tools can export from R via haven, feather, or pyreadr (Python). File sizes, variable counts, and observation counts:

Citation

Schwalbach, Jan; Hetzer, Lukas; Proksch, Sven-Oliver; Rauh, Christian; Sebők, Miklós (2025): ParlLawSpeech. GESIS, Cologne. Data file Version 1.0.0. DOI: 10.7802/2824