Swedish Government Bills Database

The Swedish Government Bills Database comprises three datasets: one focusing on the bills themselves (Section 1), one on the bills’ parliamentary outcomes (Section 2), and one on the bills’ citations of commission reports (Section 3). 

The data were collected within the framework of the project Setting the Agenda in the Swedish Riksdag: Partisan Politics and Commissions of Inquiry, 1971–2021, funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant no. 2020-01781). The project also covers a database focused on Swedish government commissions.

Each dataset has its own unit of analysis. In the bills dataset, one observation corresponds to a unique government bill, with variables capturing attributes such as the bill’s title, delivery date, and responsible department. In the parliamentary outcomes dataset, one observation corresponds to a unique parliamentary decision on a government bill, with variables capturing attributes such as the bill’s written proposals, the responsible standing committee, and the chamber’s final passage vote. In the citations dataset, one observation corresponds to a unique report citation in a government bill, with variables capturing attributes such as the bill and report serial numbers. In total, the database covers about 8,500 bills, 29,000 parliamentary decisions, and 25,000 report citations.

The datasets are linked through the bills’ official serial numbers, ensuring that each parliamentary decision and report citation can be associated with a unique bill. In principle, these serial numbers also allow for linking individual parliamentary decisions to specific commission reports. However, as bills can often cite multiple commission reports and be split across several parliamentary decisions, such linkages will often be “many-to-many” rather than “one-to-one”. Any other closely related public documents—such as standing committee reports, public consultations, or voting protocols—should be similarly connectable through the bills’ official serial numbers.