Geographic representation in parliamentary questions: The benefits of Wikipedia for automated analyses of legislative text

There is a growing interest in the representation of electoral districts in non-binding legislative instruments such as parliamentary questions. While early research has mostly relied on labor-intensive manual coding, scholars have increasingly turned to automated text analyses. So far, these efforts have been limited by narrow or case-specific sets of keywords, which have not yet been tested for reliability. As a step forward, this research note discusses two data sources for the comparative study of geographic representation in parliamentary text. Based on a case study of parliamentary questioning in Germany, France, and the UK, the paper concludes that Wikipedia is a promising candidate for identifying geographic representation in parliamentary text.