The Policy Process Database
The PolProDat project by Jasmin Riedl presents data to analyse the temporal features of legislative processes and the time-strategic behaviour of legislative actors in Germany.
For the first time, content overviews from the German parliamentary archives have been made machine-readable and combined with the computer-processable data of the DIP.
The dataset
What you see and explore here is processual information related to:
| Processes | 6,358 legislative processes |
| Time period | 1972–2026 |
| Election periods | 7th to 21st period |
This is the first, interim step. PolProDat also hopes to encourage political scientists to take a closer look at archival information online — also for other parliaments.
Why time matters
Time is often regarded as an indicator for the quality of democratic decision-making. Acceleration of decision-making, a break-neck pace of legislation or a short duration of processes are seen to dilute the legitimacy and quality of any political decision. Episodes of high law-making density are associated with the parliament's dwindling power of participation, resulting in a lack of parliamentary oversight.
In contrast, a long duration of policy-making is also seen as an expression of inefficiency.
Furthermore, time is also a strategic resource for political actors. If majority and minority actors, first and second chambers, governments and members of parliament have the right to initiate bills, competition over the parliamentary agenda is fierce and actors fight for their position on the parliamentary timetable. Those who have influence over parliamentary time and schedules are privileged.
Closing the data gap
Until now, there was no such data. For legislative processes in Germany, the DIP documents parliamentary procedures, but lacks information on the temporality dimension of law-making.
The PolProDat project closes this gap by combining DIP data with information from the parliamentary archives of the German Bundestag. These archives provide online data on the content of all legislative processes since the 8th election period (1976), documenting every legislative event and its respective documents.
The project collates and combines information from both the DIP and the parliamentary archives and transforms them into an integrative, machine-readable format. For the first time, this new database allows variables of interest to be generated that fully measure and analyse the temporal features of German law-making.
Of all the things that are powerful in constraining the choice set, in shaping the way we think, time and the way learning is embodied in history are certainly among the most powerful. … I will be blunt: Without a deep understanding of time, you will be lousy political scientists.
— D. C. North, 1999, p. 316