The ParlLawSpeech Parliamentary Text Data Collection >3 Million Parliamentary Bills, Laws, and Speeches from 8 Legislatures

September 19, 2026·
Jan Schwalbach
Lukas Hetzer
Lukas Hetzer
,
Sven-Oliver Proksch
,
Christian Rauh
,
Miklós Sebők
· 0 min read
Link
Abstract
Parliamentary texts are central sources for studying democratic representation, policy-making, and institutional decision-making, and they also constitute a highly valuable domain for natural language processing research. Despite their importance, access to comprehensive, clean, and machine-readable parliamentary corpora remains limited. This paper introduces the ParlLawSpeech (PLS) collection, a large-scale, curated corpus comprising more than three million documents from eight European parliaments, each covering over two decades. PLS extends existing parliamentary text resources in two key ways. First, it integrates full texts and metadata not only for parliamentary speeches but also for legislative bills and finally adopted laws. Second, it provides systematic data linkage across these document types, enabling researchers to trace the full parliamentary decision-making process from draft legislation through debate to adoption. Covering seven national parliaments and the European Parliament, PLS offers a uniquely rich resource for political science and advanced NLP research.
Type
Publication
Nature Scientific Data, 13, 1327
publications
Lukas Hetzer
Authors
Research Associate

I am a Research Associate at the Jacques Delors Centre at the Hertie School and part of the DFG-funded Research Unit “Reconfiguring Europe: Between Competence and Control”, where I work on the Coordination Project. I am also completing my PhD in Political Science at the University of Cologne.

My research focuses on European politics, political communication, public opinion, and crisis governance. I am particularly interested in how citizens, political actors, and institutions respond to political crises and broader political challenges, and how these responses shape European integration, political representation, and institutional change.

Methodologically, I work at the intersection of political science and computational social science. I use large-scale text data, computational text analysis, advanced survey designs, and (quasi-)experiments to study political discourse, public opinion, and political behaviour. I am also interested in building, linking, and analysing large-scale political datasets, particularly institutional text data from parliaments and EU institutions.

Before joining the Hertie School, I worked as a doctoral researcher at the University of Cologne and at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, where I worked on election research and data-based knowledge transfer. I also held research assistant positions at the University of Amsterdam, Ghent University, and Humboldt University of Berlin. I hold an M.Sc. in Social Sciences Research from the University of Amsterdam and a B.Sc. in Social Sciences from Humboldt University of Berlin.

I also teach courses on quantitative methods, EU politics, and crisis politics.

Please feel free to explore my work and get in touch.