Italian laws dataset details each step of legislative process
The Italian lawmaking process: a unified and structured dataset
Computation and Language
Summary
It can be hard to study how Italian laws get made because the official records are mostly just text without clear structure. The authors used a large language model to carefully pull out and organize key events, like when bills were introduced or approved, into a clean dataset. This dataset covers all laws made in Italy from 1985 to 2026, with detailed information on over 100,000 events. It helps people who want to analyze how the lawmaking process changes over time or between different parliaments.
What this means in practice
- •For government data analysts: Analyze legislative timelines and procedures across decades using a structured dataset of Italian lawmaking events.
- •For legal tech developers: Build tools that track and visualize the progress of bills in the Italian parliament from introduction to approval.
Authors
Matilde Contestabile, Chiara Ferrara, Giovanni Parrillo, Lorenzo Emer, Andrea Vandin
Abstract
The Italian legislative process is documented in detailed parliamentary records hosted in institutional websites. However, much of this information is available only as unstructured text, limiting its systematic reuse. We applied a controlled, systematic LLM-based extraction procedure, validated against manually annotated records, to convert these texts into ordered and dated events including, e.g., bill introduction, committee examination, plenary examination, and approval. The resulting dataset reconstructs the procedural histories of all 5346 Italian laws enacted between 1985 and 2026, spanning parliamentary terms IX to XIX, for overall 101413 events. Each event records the activity, date, and chamber, with additional procedural details where available. The dataset supports research in the emerging fields of computational legal and legislative studies, potentially combined with process-oriented data science methods to examine procedural paths and legislative timing across parliamentary terms.