Elgar encyclopedia of parliamentary studies: Parliamentary reporting

Parliamentary reporting is an established feature of representative parliamentary democracies. It is both a political phenomenon and a specialised text genre, with research value across disciplines and across time. The widespread digitisation of parliamentary reports has exponentially increased their availability and usability, as has the development of specialised parliamentary corpora. Most Commonwealth and North American legislatures publish an official English-language transcript of debates for each day of sitting. Many other legislatures also publish daily reports, most often in languages other than English. Each parliamentary report is a rich record of language, society and culture in a particular institutional and national setting. Scholars should consider the social and political context of their chosen data while also bearing in mind its potential limitations.

Keywords: Colonialism; Corpus Linguistics; Hansard; Official Report; Parliamentary Debates; Parliamentary Corpora