Summary Documents and the Secrets they Hold -- Part 1

One of our main data sources for our Project 130 Years of Swiss Parliament (click here for the project overview) are so-called summary of proceedings documents. The Amtliches Bulltin publishes summary documents (dt. Übersicht der Verhandlungen or summary of proceedings) for each parliamentary session. These documents contain a list of proposed bills by the members of parliament along with additional information (date of submission, bill text, committee assignments, co-sponsorship, and dates of important decisions).

One of the main tasks of our project is extracting all relevant information in these summary documents and structuring them in a relational database.

The following entities are extracted for each bill listed in the summary documents:

• bill number, identifier
• bill title
• date of submission
• bill text
• committee assignments (for NR and SR)

The following entities are recorded in the summary documents, but are not (yet) extracted:

• dates of important decisions (no need yet)
• whether or not the bill is recorded in the AB (no need yet)

The following page extract highlights (red) how a certain bill is generally represented in the summary documents. The text boxes in blue show the different entities that can be separated and extracted.

For certain interventions (Motion, Postulat, Interpellation, Anfragen, etc), members of parliament can sign onto bills, i.e., co-sponsor bills. These Mitunterzeichner are recorded in the summary documents:

Over the years, the layout of the summary document changed slightly. However, the information recorded has remained relatively stable: