Research infrastructure for the intersection of law and politics (LAWPOL)

The new RI for the intersections of law and politics labelled LAWPOL will be built upon the existing infrastructure of LAWRADAR (lakitutka.fi), which contains comprehensive data of Finnish legislative processes, and the machine-readable corpus FINPARL, which contains Finnish parliamentary documents.

LAWPOL will combine, expand, and develop the above-mentioned RIs to facilitate the exploration of the law-politics interface and enhance interdisciplinary research in several fields of science. 

LAWPOL will also have a wide societal impact, as it will improve access to information and offer a multitude of services for distinct user groups.

The new project will strengthen the existing local university cooperation at ‘Campus Åboensis’ between the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University.

Other local actors will benefit from and participate in the project.

The RI can be used as a part of the curriculum both in secondary education and at university level  in the Turku region.

The local legal industry will also benefit from LAWPOL. An existing cooperation group with local law firms is already active, and this cooperation will continue.

In addition to the data already existing in the LAWRADAR and FINPARL, the new RI will include the international origins of legislation, the implementation of legislation in courts of law, interpretations of law in open access research literature, and political agendas, manifestos, and other documents from political parties.

Access to preparatory legislative materials will be expanded historically from those published online to those currently only available in analogue form in the National Archives to bring out the benefits that LAWPOL offers for historical research as well.

The database will also be made more widely accessible by including translations of official documents in Swedish – a language widely understood in the Nordic countries.

A new digital workbench with a set of digital research tools will be developed.

By providing a robust set of high-quality, yet easy-to-use methods for data analysis and visualisations in the digital workbench, LAWPOL aims to improve the availability of these tools for both researchers and non-academic users.

By doing this, the infrastructure helps users to think outside the box, uncover new topics and questions, and create new hypotheses.