Data

Speeches and laws — v1.1 release.

The current release covers four Central European legislatures — Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia — spanning 1990–2024. Speech files ship as .CSV and .RDS; law files ship as .tab and .RDS. All on Harvard Dataverse under CC0 1.0.

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CZ · Czechia

Poslanecká sněmovna

Lower chamber
Speeches
1993–2024
Laws
1990–2023
HU · Hungary

Országgyűlés

Unicameral
Speeches
1990–2024
Laws
1990–2024
PL · Poland

Sejm

Lower chamber
Speeches
1991–2023
Laws
1992–2023
SK · Slovakia

Národná rada

Unicameral
Speeches
1994–2023
Laws
1991–2024

License

All released versions of ParlText are distributed under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public-domain dedication), ensuring open access for research, teaching, and journalism. Published releases remain permanently accessible via Harvard Dataverse.

File formats

Speech files ship as .CSV and .RDS (R native). Law files ship as .tab (tab-separated) and .RDS. Per-country codebooks accompany each dataset as PDF. Users working in other environments can convert via R packages like haven, feather, or arrow.

The ParlLawSpeech standard

ParlText follows the ParlLawSpeech data standard for linking speeches and laws across jurisdictions. Records carry consistent date, speaker, agenda, and document-type fields, so debates and resulting laws can be joined within a country and compared across them.