Greek Parliament Proceedings, 1989-2020

This dataset is produced on behalf of iMEdD by PhD Student in Machine Learning Konstantina Dritsa, with the contribution of data journalist and iMEdD Lab Project Manager Kelly Kiki. iMEdD (incubator for Media Education and Development) is a non-profit journalism organisation that supports and promotes transparency, credibility and independence in journalism. Lab is iMEdD’s content production division which publishes original interactive investigative and data-driven stories by experimenting with new forms and tools in journalism. 

This dataset is the next version of a previous upload, which originated from the work implemented during the course of the Master thesis entitled "Speech quality and sentiment analysis on the Hellenic Parliament proceedings" at the Athens University of Economics & Business in 2018 under the supervision of the Associate Professor Panagiotis Louridas.

This dataset includes 1,280,918 speeches (rows) of Greek parliament members with a total volume of 2.4 GB, that were exported from 5,355 parliamentary sitting record files. They extend chronologically from 1989 up to late July 2020. The dataset consists of a .csv file in UTF-8 encoding and includes the following columns of data:

• member_name: the official name of the parliament member who talked during a sitting.

• sitting_date: the date that the sitting took place.

• parliamentary_period: the name and/or number of the parliamentary period that the speech took place in. A parliamentary period includes multiple parliamentary sessions.

• parliamentary_session: the name and/or number of the parliamentary session that the speech took place in. A parliamentary session includes multiple parliamentary sittings.

• parliamentary_sitting: the name and/or number of the parliamentary sitting that the speech took place in.

• political_party: the political party that the speaker belonged to the moment of their speech.

• government: the government in force when the speech took place.

• member_region: the electoral district the speaker belonged to.

• roles: information about the parliamentary roles and/or government position of the speaker the moment of their speech.

• member_gender: the sex of the speaker

• speech: the speech that the member made during the parliamentary sitting

The methodology followed for the production of this dataset is described in the iMEdD Lab's article entitled "The creation of a dataset with the parliament proceedings within 31 years". Scripts and relevant documentation are available on GitHub.