Portuguese Parliament Plenary Speeches from 1976 to 2026

1,247,839 speaker interventions from plenary sessions of the Portuguese Parliament, covering a 50-year period from 1976 through January 2026. It includes structured variables such as speaker, party, date, and full intervention text, extracted from manually collected session transcripts.

Use Cases

• Analyze longitudinal trends in parliamentary discourse using the full intervention text and date fields across 1.2 million records.
• Model party dynamics and coalition patterns by examining speaker and party affiliations over the 50-year time range.
• Train NLP models for political communication analysis on the Portuguese-language intervention text corpus.
• Study democratic representation by correlating speaker metadata with thematic content extracted from the intervention text.

Strengths

• Contains 1,247,839 intervention records, providing a substantial corpus for analysis.
• Covers a 50-year longitudinal time range from 1976 to 2026, enabling long-term trend studies.
• Includes structured metadata such as speaker, party, and date alongside full text transcripts.

Limitations

• The specific column schema is unknown, which may complicate initial data exploration and require schema inference.
• Potential for transcription errors or inconsistencies inherent in manually collected and parsed session transcripts.
• Focus is exclusively on Portugal, limiting geographic generalizability.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse, authored by Manuel João Cruz.

Collection Method

Interventions extracted from manually collected session transcripts of the Portuguese Parliament (Assembleia da República).

Time Range

1976 through January 2026.

Freshness

Data includes records up to January 2026 and was last updated on 2026-02-11.

Geography

Portugal.