Cross-Organizational Analysis of Parliamentary Processes: A Case Study

2025-08-14

AI Summary

A lack of empirical comparative studies exists at the intersection of political science and process mining. Method: This study systematically applies process mining techniques to analyze legislative workflows in German state parliaments—constructing and comparatively evaluating end-to-end process models for three state legislatures using legally mandated, multi-source parliamentary data, and validating findings through political theory and domain expert review. Contribution/Results: The work establishes (1) a novel quantitative modeling paradigm for cross-organizational political processes in the public sector; (2) an integrated methodological framework that tightly couples process mining with institutional political analysis; and (3) empirically grounded, policy-actionable evidence for legislative process optimization—thereby advancing interdisciplinary pathways for digital governance in public administration.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Intelligent Query Processing
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Interdisciplinary science discovery with web data mining
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience

Abstract

Process Mining has been widely adopted by businesses and has been shown to help organizations analyze and optimize their processes. However, so far, little attention has gone into the cross-organizational comparison of processes, since many companies are hesitant to share their data. In this paper, we explore the processes of German state parliaments that are often legally required to share their data and run the same type of processes for different geographical regions. This paper is the first attempt to apply process mining to parliamentary processes and, therefore, contributes toward a novel interdisciplinary research area that combines political science and process mining. In our case study, we analyze legislative processes of three German state parliaments and generate insights into their differences and best practices. We provide a discussion of the relevance of our results that are based on knowledge exchange with a political scientist and a domain expert from the German federal parliament.

Problem

• Cross-organizational comparison of parliamentary processes using process mining
• Application of process mining to German state parliaments' legislative processes
• Identifying differences and best practices in parliamentary workflows

Innovation

• Process mining applied to parliamentary processes
• Cross-organizational comparison of legislative processes
• Insights from German state parliaments analysis