Open Data from 🇨🇭 Parliaments and Politics

We are collaboratively building an open standard and API for harmonized Swiss parliamentary data to promote transparency, innovation and participation in Swiss politics.

The Problem

As a citizen, journalist, scientist or civil society organization, it is currently only possible to follow a specific political issue at different federal levels or from A to Z at great expense or effort. The reason: the 26 cantonal parliaments, 461 municipal parliaments and the national parliament publish their data in different formats, structures and qualities that are not compatible and linked with each other. There is no free way to search data from several parliaments in a structured way or to obtain the data. This makes civil society initiatives more difficult and creates unnecessary barriers to active citizen participation. Initiatives that use parliamentary data (e.g. Prototype Fund projects: Demokratis, VoteLog, CH+ Games for Democracy) have so far been limited to data at the federal level. The effort to include the cantonal and communal level is disproportionately large due to the inadequacy of the data.

Our Approach

Our data infrastructure imports data from 74 national, cantonal and municipal parliaments and partially* cleans, harmonizes and publishes them openly for you to build tools, data visualizations and analyses. Existing initiatives can now also include data from cantons and cities and new fields of application are opening up for the use and analysis of structured Swiss parliamentary data (e.g. political monitoring for civil society organizations (Politpulse), transparency of vested interests: Lobbywatch, monitoring of voting behavior: Smartmonitor, techrating.ch as well as search and summarize council debates using AI: LegisLense).

We are working on this openly and collaboratively. Check out what we are currently working on and contribute.

To solve the problem at its root, we are developing standards that will enable parliaments and governments to publish uniform Open data. We are currently working on this within the eCH expert group (eCH Fachgruppe Politische Geschäfte). Follow the progress and contribute.

The Current State

The API Beta version is currently ready for testing. So if you are a journalist, political scientist, developer, civil society actor or just someone interested in data on political affairs, parliamentary proceedings, political actors, decrees, consultations etc., please test our API’s functionalities and provide us with feedback on your observations, any issues, or missing options via creating issues (with label = API)! Additionally, we have created a minimal graphical user interface (GUI) to preview the data. Please also test it and provide us with feedback using issues (label = GUI/website).

• Endpoint + Description of the Routes + fields configuration: https://api.openparldata.ch
• Documentation (Swagger): https://api.openparldata.ch/documentation
• Alternative Documentation: https://api.openparldata.ch/redoc
• OpenAPI 3.0 documentation: https://api.openparldata.ch/openapi.json
• Minimal GUI: https://openparldata.ch/searchservice

*a lot of it is still and will be work in progress for some time e.g. harmonized affair types

♥

Thanks to Mercator Foundation Switzerland and everyone who contributed for making this possible.