niekbiesterbos/dutch-climate-parl

DutchClimateParl

DutchClimateParl is a multi-genre corpus of Dutch parliamentary climate discourse (2008–2025), comprising 26,164 annotated texts across three communicative contexts: parliamentary motions, election manifesto phrases, and parliamentary speech utterances. Each text is annotated with seven issue-frame scores on a 1–5 Likert scale, derived from few-shot prompting of Qwen 2.5 32B and validated against a manually annotated gold standard.

The corpus is introduced and described in:

Biesterbos, N. (2025). From Rhetoric to Action: Climate Framing in Dutch Politics (2008–2025). Master's thesis, University of Groningen.

Replication code: github.com/niekbiesterbos/dutch-climate-framing

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Dataset summary

File	N	Period	Source
motions.csv	9,353	2008–2025	Tweede Kamer OData API
speeches.csv	15,096	2017–2022	ParlaMint-NL (Erjavec et al., 2023)
manifestos.csv	1,715	2010–2023	Party election manifestos (manual extraction)

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Dataset structure

motions.csv

Parliamentary motions classified as climate-related by a fine-tuned RoBERTa classifier.

Column	Type	Description
id	string	UUID from the Tweede Kamer OData API
date	string	ISO 8601 date
party	string	Normalised party abbreviation (e.g. GroenLinks, VVD, FvD)
fractions	string	Full fraction string from the API (semicolon-separated)
title	string	Motion title
text	string	Original motion text
normalized_text	string	Cleaned version used for LLM annotation
economic	int [1–5]	Issue frame score
moral	int [1–5]	Issue frame score
scientific	int [1–5]	Issue frame score
security	int [1–5]	Issue frame score
health_environment	int [1–5]	Issue frame score
crisis_urgency	int [1–5]	Issue frame score
weaponization	int [1–5]	Issue frame score
dominant_frame	string	Frame with the highest score
has_parse_failure	bool	True if the LLM returned a malformed response

speeches.csv

Climate-relevant speech utterances from ParlaMint-NL, selected by keyword filter.

Column	Type	Description
doc_id	string	ParlaMint utterance identifier
date	string	ISO 8601 date
year	int	Year
party	string	Normalised party abbreviation
text	string	Speech utterance text
economic – weaponization	int [1–5]	Issue frame scores (see above)
dominant_frame	string	Frame with the highest score
has_parse_failure	bool	True if the LLM returned a malformed response

manifestos.csv

Climate-relevant phrase-level extracts from Dutch party election manifestos.

Column	Type	Description
party	string	Normalised party abbreviation
year	int	Election year
source_file	string	Original PDF filename
pages	string	Page range in the source PDF
text	string	Extracted manifesto phrase
economic – weaponization	int [1–5]	Issue frame scores (see above)
dominant_frame	string	Frame with the highest score
has_parse_failure	bool	True if the LLM returned a malformed response

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Issue frame schema

Seven frames adapted from Nisbet (2009) for the Dutch parliamentary context, scored on a behaviourally anchored 1–5 Likert scale (1 = Absent, 5 = Dominant):

Frame	Core question
economic	Is the argument structured around costs, jobs, or competitiveness?
moral	Is duty, fairness, or intergenerational equity the primary justification?
scientific	Does the text invoke empirical evidence as the central argument?
security	Is geopolitical stability or national security the frame?
health_environment	Are health impacts or ecosystem damage foregrounded?
crisis_urgency	Is existential threat or irreversibility the driving logic?
weaponization	Is climate used as a political conflict instrument?

Scores of 1 on all seven frames indicate no detectable issue framing signal; such texts are excluded from the analyses in the accompanying thesis but retained here.

Full scoring rubrics and behavioural anchors are provided in Appendix A of the thesis.

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Parties and blocs

Abbreviation	Full name	Ideological bloc
GroenLinks	GroenLinks	Left
PvdA	Partij van de Arbeid	Left
GroenLinks-PvdA	GroenLinks-PvdA (merged 2023)	Left
PvdD	Partij voor de Dieren	Left
D66	Democraten 66	Centre
CDA	Christen-Democratisch Appèl	Centre
VVD	Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie	Right
PVV	Partij voor de Vrijheid	Right
FvD	Forum voor Democratie	Right
BBB	BoerBurgerBeweging	Right

The corpus also contains texts from smaller parties (SP, ChristenUnie, SGP, 50Plus, DENK, JA21, NSC, Volt, Bij1) that are not part of the ten-party analysis in the thesis but are included in the full dataset.

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Source data

Motions were retrieved from the Tweede Kamer OData API and classified as climate-related using a RoBERTa model (GroNLP/bert-base-dutch-cased) fine-tuned on a seed set of ParlaMint climate motions and iteratively expanded via self-training.

Speeches were drawn from ParlaMint-NL 4.0 (Erjavec et al., 2023), restricted to utterances containing at least one of twelve climate-relevant keywords.

Manifestos were manually extracted from PDF election manifestos by the author following a climate-relevance inclusion protocol, covering all major Dutch parties from 2010 to 2023.

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Annotation

Issue frame scores were generated by Qwen 2.5 32B (instruction-tuned) using a cross-lingual few-shot prompting strategy: English-language system instructions, frame definitions, and five calibration examples per frame were paired with the original untranslated Dutch texts. The model was instructed to return a single integer Likert score per frame as structured output.

Model selection was validated against a manually annotated gold standard:

Text type	Gold N	Qwen 2.5 32B Spearman ρ
Motions	408	0.712
Manifestos	216	0.754

The gold standard was annotated by a single coder (the author) using a printed codebook with explicit decision rules for each Likert level.

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Limitations

• Gold standard produced by a single annotator; inter-annotator agreement cannot be computed.
• Speech corpus covers 2017–2022 only and excludes BBB and GroenLinks-PvdA.
• All-ones texts (no framing signal) are included in the dataset but excluded from the thesis analyses.
• Manifesto extraction reflects one operationalisation of climate relevance and carries selection subjectivity that cannot be quantified.

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License

The frame annotations are released under CC BY 4.0. The underlying parliamentary texts are in the public domain. Manifesto texts are copyright of the respective parties; their inclusion here is for non-commercial research purposes.

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Citation

@mastersthesis{biesterbos2026,
  author = {Biesterbos, Niek},
  title  = {From Rhetoric to Action: Climate Framing in Dutch Politics (2008--2025)},
  school = {University of Groningen},
  year   = {2026}
}