Images from left to right: Hanne Salonen / Finnish Parliament, Hannu Häkkinen / The Finnish Heritage Agency, Lauri Putkonen / Helsinki City Museum

What is LAWPOL?

LAWPOL is a new research infrastructure that brings political and legal documents related to public decision-making in one place and provides digital tools to study them. 

The new LAWPOL Research Infrastructure, which utilizes the already existing Lakitutka.fi service and FINPARL corpus, covers the entire life cycle of decision-making from political programmes to court decisions. The research infrastructure is being built by the Faculty of Law and the Centre for Parliamentary Studies at the University of Turku, as well as the Institute for Human Rights at Åbo Akademi University, each bringing their own special expertise.

LAWPOL encompasses key legal materials for the legislative process.This includes documents produced by legislators, stakeholders, and experts, EU legislation, as well as national and international case law.

Also included is the political dimension of legislation. For instance, parliamentary debates, government programmes and election and party manifestos reflect the political dynamics, ideologies, interests, and conflicts related to decision-making. Previously fragmented across various sources, these materials will now be consolidated under one portal.

The new digital tools provided by LAWPOL promote interdisciplinary research, transparency, and openness in political decision-making and legislation. Above all, the user-friendly interface enables the examination of large datasets without requiring in-depth knowledge of computational methods. Read more about the project...