The European Parliament (EP) has been characterised as a ‘working parliament without public’ rather than ‘debating parliament’. However, this distinction was called into question when irregular migration became sensitive topic and national political parties polarised on policy. Thus, article explores whether one risk resulting from such characterisation – lack of public involvement is raised by...

The recurrent neural network capable to provide the Boolean factor analysis of the binary data sets of high dimension and complexity is applied to discovery of voting patterns in the Russian parliament. The new method of sequential factor extraction based on the Lyapunov function is discussed in deep. Efficiency of the new method is shown on simulated data and on real data from Russian parliame...

We are presenting a new highly multilingual document-aligned parallel corpus called DCEP Digital Corpus of the European Parliament. It consists of various document types covering a wide range of subject domains. With a total of 1.37 billion words in 23 languages (253 language pairs), gathered in the course of ten years, this is the largest single release of documents by a European Union institu...

The paper applies a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo estimation methodology to scale roll call votes in the 35 and 38 Canadian Parliaments over a multidimensional policy space. The results clearly demonstrate that policy debates are two-dimensional in Canada. The first dimension represents the classical division between the governing and the opposition parties that has been found in similar Pa...

Today, the EU is no longer a mere union of states, but more and more a union of citizens. Nevertheless, European decisions are still taken almost exclusively by the states. The role of the elected European Parliament as a source of direct legitimation is underdeveloped. This role has to be further strengthened if we are to overcome the democratic deficit of the Union-through more decision-makin...