About

The full legislative pipeline, linked.

ParlLawSpeech (PLS) is an open dataset that joins parliamentary speeches, draft bills, and enacted laws from seven European countries and the European Parliament — every record carrying a common identifier so the full arc of a legislative item can be traced end-to-end.

From ParlSpeech to PLS

PLS builds on ParlSpeech v1 and v2, which already provided floor speeches across nine legislatures over up to thirty years. PLS extends this foundation with two additional document types — bills and laws — and adds a linking key tying each speech to the bill it discussed and the law that resulted, where one was enacted.

Coverage

The current release covers eight legislatures: Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and the European Parliament. The corpus contains 3.09 million speeches, 43,582 bills, and 28,124 laws — a total of roughly 4 GB of text and metadata.

OPTED & funding

PLS was produced as part of Work Package 5 of the OPTED project (Observatory for Political Texts in European Democracies), funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 951832.

Citation

Schwalbach, Jan; Hetzer, Lukas; Proksch, Sven-Oliver; Rauh, Christian; Sebők, Miklós (2025): ParlLawSpeech. GESIS, Cologne. Data file Version 1.0.0. DOI: 10.7802/2824

01
Speeches
3.09 million parliamentary floor utterances across eight legislatures, with speaker, date, party, and agenda metadata.
02
Bills
43,582 legislative proposals — full text plus structured fields covering sponsor, introduction date, and legislative status.
03
Laws
28,124 enacted laws, with full text and codified metadata for cross-jurisdiction comparison.
04
Linking key
A common identifier joins speech → bill → law, exposing the full legislative pipeline as one queryable corpus.