DEPRECATION NOTICE

The Swedish Parliament Corpus has moved over to the SWERIK Project github page. v.0.14.0 was the last release under this repository. Please visit the new repo for the most up-to-date releases.

Swedish parliamentary proceedings --- 1867--today --- v0.14.0

Westac Project, 2020--2024 | Swerik Project, 2023--2025

The data set

The full data set consists of multiple parts:

Parliamentary records (riksdagens protokoll) from 1867 until today in the Parla-clarin format
Comprehensive list of members of parliament, ministers and governments during this period + associated metadata (mandate periods, party info, etc)
[In progress] An annotated catalog of motions submitted to the parliament with linked metadata
Documentation of the corpus and the curation process
A Google Colab notebook that demonstrates how the dataset can be used with Python

Basic use

A full dataset is available under this download link. It has the following structure

Annual Parliamentary record (protocol) files in the corpus/protocols/ directory
Structured metadata on members of parliament, ministers, and governments in the corpus/metadata/ directory

The workflow to use the data is demonstrated in this Google Colab notebook.

Design choices of the project

The Riksdagen corpus is released as an iterative process, where the corpus is continuously curated and expanded. Semantic versioning is used for the whole corpus, following the established major-minor-patch practices as they apply to data. For each major and minor release, a battery of unit tests are run and a statistical sample is drawn, annotated and quantitatively evaluated to ensure integrety and quality of updated data. Errors are fixed as they are detected in order of priority. Moreover, the edit history is kept as a traceable git repository.

While the contents of the corpus will change due to curation and expansion, we aim to keep the deliverable API, the corpus/ folder, as stable as possible. This means we avoid relocating files or folders, changing formats, changing columns in metadata files, or any other changes that might break downstream scripts. Conversely, files outside the corpus/ folder are internal to the project. End users may find utility in them but we make no effort to keep them consistent.

The data in the corpus is delivered as TEI XML files to follow established practices. The metadata is delivered as CSV files, following a normal form database structure while allowing for a legible git history. A more detailed description of the data and metadata structure and formats can be found in the README files in the corpus/ folder.

Descriptive statistics at a glance

Currently, we have an extensive set of Parliamentary Records (Riksdagens Protokoll) from 1867 until now. We are in the process of preparing Motions for inclusion in the corpus and other document types will follow.

	v0.14.0	v0.13.1	v0.13.0
Corpus size (GB)	5.48	5.48	5.48
Number of parliamentary records	17642	17642	17642
Total parliamentary record pages*	1045458	1045458	1045458
Total parliamentary record speeches	1014214	1014214	1014214
Total parliamentary record words	442634322	442634322	442634322
Number of Motions	0	0	0
Total motion pages	0	0	0
Total motion words	0	0	0
Number of people with MP role	5975	5975	5975
Number of people with minister role	546	546	546

* Digital original parliamentary records for some years in the 1990s are not paginated and thus do not contribute to the page count.See also §Number of Pages in Parliamentary Records.

Parliamentary Records over time

Number of Parliamentary Records

Number of Pages in Parliamentary Records

Number of Speeches in Parliamentary Records

Note: We are aware of an issue whereby speeches are over counted in the data's current form in the years after 2014 -- we're working on a fix. Until then, the following static graph is a better representation of the actual speeches in the Parliamentary Records for those years.