A complete dataset of roll-call votes in the Swedish parliament, 1925-1993

The purpose of the project is to make all roll-call votes in the Swedish Parliament from 1925 to 1993 accessible to the public. Today, roll-call votes are available via the parliament's website for all yearly sessions from 1993/94. Roll-call votes before 1993, however, are stored in formats that make systematic analysis impossible. We will take advantage of the Parliamentary Library's digital archive to recover the original voting records and use OCR-techniques to compile the information into a format more amenable to conventional statistical analysis. When the project is completed, we will be able to gain answers to a wide array of questions about Swedish political history that have hitherto not been possible to answer, for instance, concerning the development of party discipline, the parliamentarians’ ideological positions, and the power relations between the executive and legislative branches.