Legislative Readability in Brazil (2003–2025): Analytical Dataset and Replication Code

Analytical dataset and replication code for the paper "Legislative Readability and Ideological Orientation: A Computational Analysis of Brazilian Congressional Bills (2003–2025)."

The dataset comprises 8,847 legislative proposals (Ordinary Bills and Complementary Bills) submitted to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies between 2003 and 2025. Each proposal includes readability metrics (Flesch Reading Ease adapted for Brazilian Portuguese, Gunning Fog Index), ideological classification of the author's party (left/center/right following Power & Zucco, 2009; Zucco & Power, 2024), political position (government/opposition), and BERTopic-derived topic assignments.

The package includes: (1) the analytical dataset in CSV format (8,847 observations, 22 variables); (2) complete Python replication pipeline (data collection, processing, readability analysis, statistical modeling, topic modeling, and visualization); (3) statistical results in JSON format, including OLS regression models, robustness checks with clustered standard errors, and BERTopic outlier analysis; (4) publication-quality figures.

Original data were collected from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies Open Data API (https://dadosabertos.camara.leg.br).