The ParlSpeech V2 data set: Full-text corpora of 6.3 million parliamentary speeches in the key legislative chambers of nine representative democracies

Rauh, Christian; Schwalbach, Jan

2020

This dataset is an extensive collection of parliamentary speeches from nine representative democracies, offering valuable insights into legislative discourse across different political systems. ParlSpeech V2 contains complete full-text vectors of more than 6.3 million parliamentary speeches in the key legislative chambers of Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, covering periods between 21 and 32 years. Meta-data include information on date, speaker, party, and partially agenda item under which a speech was held. The accompanying release note provides a more detailed guide to the data (2020-03-11). The speeches span from 1987 to 2018 and the full dataset has a size of 1,5 GB.

It is organized into separate R Data files for each country, with each file containing:​

• debate: Title of the debate (if available).​

• party: Name of the party to which the speaker belongs.​

• text: Full text of the speech as recorded by the parliament.​

• SPEAKER: Name of the individual delivering the speech.