A century of parliament and political elites in Turkey

This paper presents an original dataset of all the parliamentarians who served in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey from 1920 to 2015, as well as their parliamentary activities. Specifically, the dataset includes (i) the background characteristics of over 11,000 members of parliament (MP) such as past parliamentary experience, party switches, localness, education, age, gender, family status, (ii) the characteristics of the electoral province represented by the MP, (iii) parliamentary speeches, questions, and private members' bills by individual MPs, (iv) and the policy content of the legislative speeches based on the Comparative Agendas Project coding scheme. I illustrate the utility of the dataset by examining the determinants of legislative speechmaking across 22 electoral cycles in the past 100 years, and where the results show that the motivation to take the legislative floor is a product of legislative role orientations, and resources. I also point to some of the interesting research questions the dataset might be of help in exploring.