LAWPOL – a cutting-edge research infrastructure bringing transparency to the legislative process
LAWPOL offers both researchers as well as non-academic users information about the legislative process as well as useful tools to for in-depth analysis. With the help of AI, one will even be able to extract meaning from the text and speech found in the LAWPOL database.
LAWPOL is a new research infrastructure for the intersections of law and politics. It is developed by the Faculty of Law and Centre of Parliamentary Studies in the University of Turku, and the Faculty of Law in Åbo Akademi. It is being built upon the infrastructure of Lakitutka, a comprehensive database of Finnish legislative processes, and the machine-readable corpus FINPARL, which consists of Finnish parliamentary documents. LAWPOL will develop these further and build brand-new tools for the exploration of the law-politics interface.
LAWPOL will expand the existing Lakitutka database with historical legislative materials that are currently only available in paper form in the depths of the Finnish National Archives. The database will also include the international origins of legislation, the implementation of legislation in courts of law, the interpretations of law in open access research literature as well as the political agendas, manifestos, and other documents from political parties. Moreover, the infrastructure will increase language equality by providing as much material in Swedish as possible.
Additionally, LAWPOL will provide high-quality, yet easy-to-use research tools for data-analysis and visualisations. Examples of these tools are Keyword in Context and Text Network Analysis tools, that are currently public as beta versions and will be developed further during spring of 2024. Other tools are also being developed: One tool can be used to identify thematic speech from parliamentary speech, and another can be used to analyse the sentimental charge of parliamentary speeches. These tools are created together with TurkuNLP – a research group at the University of Turku that specialises in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Unlike standard computer programs that simply “read” text, NLP is a form of Artificial Intelligence than aims to give programs a human-like ability to understand the language, identify emotions, interpret meanings and more.
While these tools may appear difficult to understand, the goal of LAWPOL is to make them accessible for researchers and non-academic users alike. We want everyone to gain interest in the processes and politics behind legislation – to ask questions and get answers.
LAWPOL can be used by anyone. Upon the publication of its first version this year, we will promote it to researchers, lawmakers, lawyers, educators, and all kinds of active citizens in Finland. But we will not stop at Finland – the long-term goal is to develop LAWPOL into an internationally established forerunner and model for respective RIs in other countries. In other words – to conquer the world!
LAWPOL-team
The author is LAWPOL-team, consisting of professors, researchers, assistants, and software developers from University of Turku and Åbo Akademi.
LAWPOL has received funding from the European Union – NextGenerationEU instrument and is funded by the Academy of Finland under grant numbers 352827, 353569 and 352828.
