This website showcases the ParlLawSpeech (PLS) dataset, a collection of legal texts made under the auspices of the OPTED (Observatory for Political Texts in European Democracies) project. PLS is a legacy project of ParlSpeech (V1, V2), created by Christian Rauh, Pieter De Wilde, and Jan Schwalbach, containing full-text vectors of parliamentary speeches from 9 legislatures. Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program (Grant agreement 951832), Sven-Oliver Proksch, Christian Rauh, and Miklós Sebők led the scientific effort within Work Package 5 (WP5) of the OPTED project leading up to the creation of a new linked data sources for parliamentary speeches, bills and laws. The resulting PLS dataset is the joint effort of the work package leaders, as well as Lukas Hetzer and Jan Schwalbach, and additional team members (see Team).

The new dataset offers a unique collection of machine-readable full-text vectors for legislative documents (including parliamentary speeches, bills, and laws) alongside their metadata. PLS covers seven European countries (Austria, Czechia, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, and Spain) and the European Parliament. The novelty of this dataset lies in the common identifier that links these three types of documents. This allows researchers to analyse the entire lawmaking process—from proposal through parliamentary debates to final enactment. This website also leverages interactive visualisations and tutorials to empower researchers to explore the relationships and trends within the PLS dataset, fostering a deeper understanding of the European lawmaking process.