From the parliamentary polls to CLARIN:EL

On the occasion of the upcoming parliamentary elections (21 May 2023), we dedicate this month to resources which are hosted in the CLARIN:EL Infrastructure and constitute members of the Elections Resource Family.

Vassiliki Georgiadou (Professor, Department of Political Science & History, Panteion University) and Jenny Mavropoulou (PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science & History, Panteion University), Scientific and Technical Responsibles for the creation of the Institutional Repository of Panteion University at CLARIN:EL, talk about the Party manifestos of Greek Parliamentary Parties in the National Elections that took place during the period 2009-2019:

It is a text corpus of party manifestos involving programmatic stances and policy positions as stated officially by political parties of Greek Parliamentary Parties for the Parliamentary elections held during the period 2009-2019. The corpus includes data in TXT format.

More specifically, the collection, documentation and storage of these language resources spans from 2009 to 2019. Behind the selection of this eleven-year period (2009-2019), which includes five main contests at the level of national elections, one of which was a double contest as there was a re-election and a repeat of national elections (in total, these were the national elections of October 2009, May and June 2012, January 2015, September 2015, July 2019), the thought was to cover a "critical" period of the Third Hellenic Republic, which is defined by the prelude/beginning of the economic crisis in Greece (2009), the peak (2012-2015) and the end (or, more correctly, the beginning of the end) of the economic recession (2019). It is worth mentioning that during this period, forty (40) political parties were represented in the National Parliament, a significant number of political parties that is clearly higher than the corresponding number of previous periods of the post-independence period.  

The available language resources constitute monolingual text corpora of the Greek language, allowing the user to both linguistically process them and explore the programmatic stances and policy positions of the parties in a period of time that extends from just before the onset of the domestic crisis and its multifaceted consequences to the gradual stabilization of the Greek economy and the party system. When examined from a content perspective, these language resources present a particularly wide variety and this is because the party manifestos of political parties highlight the whole range of issues - economic, social, cultural, environmental, etc. - that concern a state. Consequently, as far as party manifestos are concerned, they can be used by those interested in language resources, which span a wide range of disciplines and cover scientific disciplines beyond Political Science and Political Sociology. 

Access to these resources is freely available for research purposes through CLARIN:EL under a CC-BY-NC (Attribution, Non-Commercial Use) License of Use.