About

An open corpus for legislative text analysis.

ParlText is a linked database of parliamentary speeches and enacted laws, built on the ParlLawSpeech data standard so debates and resulting laws can be joined within a country and compared across jurisdictions. Version 1.1 covers four Central European legislatures — Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.

Coverage

The v1.1 Dataverse release covers four Central European legislatures. Speech and law coverage do not always start in the same year — Czech and Slovak speech archives begin with their respective independent parliaments, while law records go back further. Expansion to additional legislatures is planned for future releases.

  • Czechia · Poslanecká sněmovna · speeches 1993–2024, laws 1990–2023
  • Hungary · Országgyűlés · speeches 1990–2024, laws 1990–2024
  • Poland · Sejm · speeches 1991–2023, laws 1992–2023
  • Slovakia · Národná rada · speeches 1994–2023, laws 1991–2024

Records are tagged with date, speaker, agenda, and document-type metadata. Bill data is not yet published in the current Dataverse release.

The ParlLawSpeech standard

ParlText follows the ParlLawSpeech standard for linking speeches and laws. Common keys mean a debate and the resulting law can be retrieved together — and statistics are comparable across jurisdictions.

Open distribution

All releases are distributed via the ParlText collection on Harvard Dataverse under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 public-domain dedication. Speech files ship as .CSV and .RDS; law files ship as .tab and .RDS.

01
Speeches
Parliamentary floor utterances with speaker, date, and agenda metadata. V1.1 covers four Central European parliaments; the standard is designed to onboard any legislature.
02
Laws
Enacted laws — full text plus codified metadata for cross-jurisdiction analysis.
03
Linked agendas
Speeches and laws cross-referenced through unique IDs following the ParlLawSpeech standard.