Scientific Data Analysis

Scientific Data Analysis#

User Story – In a Nutshell#

As a political scientist, legal scholar or linguist, I want to efficiently analyze data on political processes, issues, actors, decrees, and more in order to generate scientific insights into Swiss politics, policy and/or polity.

Status Quo and Problem#

In the Swiss political system, characteristic of federalism, political decisions are made at different jurisdictional levels, from municipal over cantonal to federal. For the study of Swiss politics and policy-making, taking into account this multi-level structure is crucial. Especially given the subsidiarity principle in Switzerland, which often delegates relevant decision-making power to lower federal levels. However, the effort for researchers to obtain subnational legislative data is disproportionately large (i.e. time-consuming and/or costly). Data is mostly not machine-readable, not harmonized and dispersed across 26 cantonal and 461 municipal parliaments. Thus, many scientific analyses focus on national data, missing an important part of the picture, and efforts of the research community to obtain lower-level data are often one-off efforts and create duplicated, but not harmonized datasets, which is very inefficient.

Use Case#

        flowchart TB
    Parl1["Most Parliaments
        (Data Providers)"] -- Web Crawling --> OPD["OpenParlData.ch
        (Data Intermediary)"]
    Parl2["Some Parliaments
        (Data Providers)"] -- API --> OPD
    Parties["3rd Party Data Providers"] -. API .-> OPD
    OPD -- API --> User1@{ label: "Researcher 1
    (Data User)" }
    OPD -- API --> User2@{ label: "Researcher 2
    (Data User)" }
    User1 <-. share/collaborate .-> User2
    User1 -. API (enriched data) .-> OPD
    User2 -. API (enriched data) .-> OPD


    style OPD stroke:#BBDEFB,fill:transparent
    style Parties stroke-width:2px,stroke-dasharray: 2

OpenParlData.ch imports, cleans, harmonizes and openly publishes data from Swiss parliaments. It currently offers public data on political actors, parliamentary proceedings, decrees, consultations, votes and more from 78 parliaments. Using our API supplying harmonized legislative data[1], political scientists, legal scholars or linguists can (more efficiently) analyze:

  • progress and success (factors) of bills e.g. relating to certain topics or by specific political actors at different federal levels,[2]

  • topical trends on political discourses in parliaments and how certain topics make it onto the legislative agenda and others do not,

  • decrees including their origins (e.g. legislative footprint) and how policies diffuse across different stages at different federal levels,

  • politicians’ actions (including voting behavior) and how it reflects on their parties (i.e. party cohesion), and

  • links between legislative data and other data sources (including media coverage, campaign donations or company registry to better understand the interplay between the parliamentary, media and economic arena, and thereby…

  • efficiently generate scientific insights into Swiss politics, policy and/or polity (also for parliaments and governments).

The harmonized structure of our data also enables researchers to make their cleaned and/or enriched data available to other researchers in an interoperable way to use synergies and gain relevance. This relates for example to the sharing and retraining of pre-trained machine learning classifiers, topic models, data processing pipelines or open source software packages for analysis of Swiss parliamentary data. Thus, OpenParlData.ch significantly raises the capacity of an entire research ecosystem.

Current scale#

We are currently in close contact with researchers from multiple universities (UZH, PHZ, ZHAW, University of Bern, USI) that plan to use our data in ongoing (e.g. EPTI)[3] or planned projects (pending funding).

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