Levelling up quantitative legislative studies on Central-Eastern Europe:

Introducing the ParlText CEE Database of Speeches, Bills, and Laws

Abstract

The availability of ready-made textual corpora for research is crucial for social scientists, especially in the current era of rapid advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) methods. Despite various useful contributions that address issues of accessibility and standardisation when it comes to such corpora, in many cases, they have limitations related to scope, geographical coverage, and time frame. This concern is particularly significant in the context of political research on Central-Eastern Europe (CEE), for which such deployment-ready databases are few and far between. In this research note, we bridge part of this gap by making available a new database: ParlText CEE. The database, prepared under the auspices of the V-Shift Momentum project at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, covers almost 1.9 million text vectors and metadata for parliamentary speeches, bills, and laws for Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia for the period from 1990–1991 to 2022–2024. The datasets encompass relevant dates, texts, titles, and, in the case of the speech corpora, parliamentary agendas, speaker names, and parties. All data are also linked based on unique identifiers following the ParlLawSpeech standard. This paper introduces the specifics of the 1.0 release of ParlText CEE and contemplates its possible use cases.