Hansard Speeches And Sentiment V2.1

<strong>Summary</strong>

A public dataset of speeches in the Hansard, stored as a tibble class in RDS files, for the R programming language, and also available as a CSV file. The dataset provides information on every speech made in the House of Commons between the parliament returned from the 1979 general election and the dissolution of parliament for the 2017 general election, with information on the speaking MP, their party, gender, birthdate, starting and finishing dates as an MP, and age at the time of the speech. The dataset also includes all speeches made from 1936 to the dissolution of parliament for the 1979 general election. The post-1979 election dataset is labelled hansard_senti_post_V21 and the pre-1979 election dataset is labelled hansard_senti_pre_V21.

The hansard_senti_post_V21 dataset contains 2,234,059 speeches and 404,581,972 words. The hansard_senti_pre_V21 dataset contains 2,977,461 speeches and 413,044,716 words. It is distributed under a Creative Commons 4.0 BY-SA licence. The latest version, V2.1, includes includes an additional sentiment library (see supplementary documentation).

<strong>Changes in V2.1</strong>

Removed 138 duplicate entries from hansard_senti_post_V21, based on them having the same parlpase ID, speech and mnis_id.

Removed 32 empty speeches from hansard_senti_post_V21.

Removed 37 duplicate entries from hansard_senti_post_V21, based on them having the same parlpase ID and speech.

Removed 115 empty speeches from hansard_senti_pre_V21.

Renamed id to pp_id to indicate where it came from.

Added additional sentiment calculation method based on this paper by Rheault <em>et al.</em> (2016).

<strong>Notes</strong>

The code and matching data used to generate this dataset is available on Github.

The data used to create this dataset was taken from the parlparse project operated by They Work For You and supported by mySociety.

The dataset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The code used to create this dataset is licensed under an MIT license.

Please contact me if you find any errors in the dataset. The integrity of the public Hansard record is questionable at times, and while I have improved it, the data is presented 'as is'.