Comparative European legislative research in the age of large-scale computational text analysis: A review article

Abstract

Advances in data accessibility and analytical methods opened new frontiers for comparative studies of European legislative activities. However, these advances still need to be fully harnessed by legislative scholars for multiple reasons. We provide an overview of extant research agendas to identify these reasons and explore the opportunities for tapping the potential of big data and quantitative text analysis. We present significant data collection efforts, such as ParlSpeech, the Comparative Agendas Project and CLARIN, and highlight their respective value for, primarily, large-N comparative research focusing on European Union member states and the European Union itself. Our review highlights the most consequential gaps in the literature and shortcomings of available data and analysis. These include the lack of extensive historical and geographical coverage, missing harmonisation and cross-linking between separate efforts, no unified speech and document (bill, law) databases, and the unavailability of good-quality full-text variables.