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
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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
Scientific Data, 13, 1327
publications
Lukas Hetzer
Authors
Doctoral Researcher

I am a doctoral researcher in Political Science at the University of Cologne, where I work on European politics, political behavior, political communication, and public opinion.

My research focuses on how citizens, political actors, and institutions respond to crises and broader political challenges. A recurring emphasis of my work is on democratic politics under pressure, with particular interests in European integration, crisis governance, institutional change, political representation, 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 am also interested in building, linking, and analysing large-scale political datasets, particularly institutional text data from parliaments and EU institutions.

I hold an 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 politics, and crisis politics.

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