ParlLawSpeech
See parllawspeech.org for image sourcesThe ParlLawSpeech dataset offers 4.02 GB of data in total, including machine-readable full texts of 43,582 bills, 28,124 laws, and 3,092,431 plenary speeches from eight European parliaments covering more than two decades each.
ParlLawSpeech is meant to push the systematic analysis of European democracies with advanced text-as-data/NLP methods. Compared to the other excellent extant political science text corpora (cf. Sebők et al. 2025), it adds two key innovations. First, the bill and law corpora are are among the most encompassing full-text vectors of legal documents handled by parliaments. Second, we provide novel data linkage possibilities by offering a common identifier across bills, corresponding plenary speeches, and finally adopted laws- opening up new analytical opportunities to study the legislative process (basic ideas in the tutorial section).
This dataset is the result of the OPTED Work Package 5 (WP5) led by Sven-Oliver Proksch, Christian Rauh, and Miklós Sebők and funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program (Grant agreement 951832). Our task was to develop different prototypes for improving access to linked parliamentary text data produced in European democracies.
More detailed information is provided on the ParlLawSpeech homepage and the data repository that is permanently stored at GESIS.
I am a doctoral researcher in Political Science at the University of Cologne, where I work on political behavior, political communication, and public opinion in Europe.
My research focuses on how citizens and political actors respond to crises and to political and technological change. A recurring emphasis of my work is on democratic politics under pressure, with particular interests in crisis governance, political representation, digital policy, and the communication of political conflict.
Methodologically, I work at the intersection of political science and computational social science. I use large-scale text data, quantitative computational methods, advanced survey designs and (quasi-)experiments to study political discourse, public opinion, and political behavior.
I hold a M.Sc. degree in Social Sciences Research from the University of Amsterdam and a B.Sc. degree in Social Sciences from Humboldt University Berlin. Before joining the University of Cologne, I worked at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences on election research and data-based knowledge transfer, and held research assistant positions at the University of Amsterdam, Ghent University, and Humboldt University Berlin. I also teach courses on quantitative methods, EU digital policy, and crisis politics.
Please feel free to explore my work and get in touch.