The TaCT‑FoRSED project has created a protocol for data collection from parliamentary records. The protocol provides a comprehensive guide for gathering parliamentary datasets across multiple countries, setting out a structured and replicable approach for sourcing, selecting, and preparing parliamentary extracts. It is based on an executable code written in Python that uses the Selenium library to automate the downloading of PDF documents and was developed by Irene Baena Álvarez and Francisco Castillo Eslava, under the leadership of Alejandro Romero Reche at the University of Granada.
Parliamentary records offer a rich source of insight into political communication, democratic responsiveness, and the ways political institutions interact with public sentiment. By systematising a method for gathering extracts from these records the protocol provides a means to create a strong base of evidence for analysing questions related to democracy across Europe and beyond.
The newly released protocol offers:
- A unified methodological framework for collecting parliamentary debates, bills, motions, and related political records from different national contexts.
- Detailed guidance on identifying relevant repositories, navigating accessibility constraints, and ensuring consistency across countries.
- Standards for documentation and metadata, enabling reliable cross-country comparison.
- Foundational input for subsequent analytical work in TaCT‑FoRSED, particularly the study of psychological and democratic conditions that influence belief in misinformation and conspiratorial narratives.
While the protocol has been developed in support of the project’s particular aims, it may be easily adapted for other parliaments, other time periods, and be used to study a wide range of different research topics unrelated to conspiracism. Potentially, it can be adjusted to collect data on absolutely any topic that is discussed in a parliament.
The guide currently covers extraction of records from Spanish, Czech and EU parliaments, and will be updated shortly to include the German, Austrian, Slovakian, UK and French parliaments.
