Abstract The availability of large amounts of machine-readable text data has enabled political scientists to explore a variety of novel and innovative research questions. In this context, parliamentary documents are a particularly valuable resource for analysing political behaviour. Parliaments are central arenas of political debate where political actors publicly justify their actions. Accordingly, parliamentary speeches offer in-depth insights into the interests and strategies of these actors. However, only a few resources are available for comparative analyses or the analysis of subnational parliaments. This article introduces StateParl, a new text corpus containing machine-readable, plenary protocols from all 16 German Länder parliaments. Beyond the introduction of the dataset, it also demonstrates one out of many possible empirical applications: the salience and sentiment surrounding Germany’s Europeanised federal system. Applications of the text corpus extend far beyond comparative subnational politics and parliamentary research to applications in party research, German politics, and text-as-data analyses more generally.
Nguyen et al. (Mon,) studied this question.