Study title

How do politicians make political arguments? What has changed in the substantive agenda of the House of Commons over time? How do MPs represent the interests of their constituents? Such questions can only be answered with rich data on the behaviour of politicians across a wide variety of policy areas. To this end, this submission contains data on all parliamentary debates held in the House of Commons between 1979 and 2019. In total, the data includes over 2.5 million speeches drawn from over 50 thousand parliamentary debates. The data includes the raw texts of the speeches delivered in the Commons, as well as a wide variety of metadata about MPs and debates. This data is likely to be useful to a wide variety of scholars in legislative politics and political communication.Discussion and debate lie at the heart of democratic politics. When asked to think about politics in the UK, many people would recall images of the Prime Minister standing at the dispatch box, clashing with the Leader of the Opposition over topical issues. Similarly, many key events in the political calendar - the Budget, the Queen's Speech - revolve around large, high-profile debates on the floor of the Commons. However, aside from these limited cases, most parliamentary debates pass unnoticed by those outside of Westminster. This is unfortunate, as parliamentary speechmaking is a central democratic responsibility of elected politicians, and debates provide MPs with the opportunity to scrutinise government policy, and to voice the concerns and interests of their constituents. Political scientists have made a great deal of progress in analysing parliamentary debate in recent years, with significant attention devoted to using speeches to uncover underlying ideological preferences of MPs, or estimating the priorities that MPs place on different policy issues. However, while these features of political debate are important, when politicians speak, they are usually doing more than expressing their...