130 Years of Swiss Parliament

We are currently working on two funded research projects surrounding the Swiss Parliament. The first project is a collaboration with the Swiss Data Science Center to build a searchable database of the Swiss Parliament. The second project is an SNF-funded project that examines how members of parliament have shaped the Swiss political landscape throughout the past 130 years.

Check back here regularly, for updates on the projects, insights into how we extract the data and our most recent findings.

Check out our project overview in four languages here:

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Project Timeline

SDSC Project: DemocraSci

Introducing our SDSC project: DemocraSci -- A Research Platform for Data-Driven Democracy Studies in Switzerland

Co-Sponsorship Networks

Introducing our SNF-project: Analyzing Co-Sponsorship Networks from 127 Years of the Swiss Federal Assembly

A new data source: Records of the Swiss Parliament

A short description of the different data sources our project on the Swiss Parliament builds on.

Summary Documents and the Secrets they Hold -- Part 1

Find out what information can be extracted from summary documents provided by the Swiss Parliament.

Summary Documents and the Secrets they Hold -- Part 2

In our second part, we show you some interesting anomalies we found in the summary documents provided by the Swiss Parliament.

Amtliches Bulletin: records of speeches, propositions and votes -- Part 1

We introduce our second main source of data for the DemocraSci project: The proceedings of the Swiss Parliament, commonly referred to as the Amtliches Bulletin.

Amtliches Bulletin: records of speeches, propositions and votes -- Part 2

We go into detail on which text elements we extract form the Amtliches Bulletin from 1891 until 1995.

Swiss Parliamentary Bills: An Overview

What types of bills does the Swiss parliament know to enact legislative changes? This blogpost gives an overview over the deliberation process of 9 types of parliamentary bills

Voting Records of the Swiss Parliament

How does the Swiss parliament report voting outcomes? Over the 130 years, voting records have been published in different styles and with varying degrees of detail, ranging from simple `angeommen` to detailed roll-call voting records.

New open position for a Hiwi - starting September 2022

We are looking for a new HiWi staring september 2022 or on agreement.

DemocraSci team: Marta Balode

After 2.5 years of working with us on DemocraSci, Marta Balode is leaving our group. Find out what she worked on during the 2.5 years and how many lines of code she wrote!

Open Student Project (6 weeks)

We're offering a new student research project to find evidence of linguistic divergence in political speeches as a sign of polarization.