From Text to Process: Leveraging LLMs to Unveil Italian Lawmaking

The Italian lawmaking process involves a complex interplay of institutions, actors, and procedural stages. Despite the existence of previous research, systematic process-oriented studies remain scarce, largely due to the absence of structured data detailing its procedural steps. We introduce ProLiFIC (Procedural Lawmaking Flow in Italian Chambers), a machine-accessible dataset of Italian legislative preparatory works from 1985 to the present. These texts are available in unstructured form on the Normattiva portal. By leveraging large language models for event extraction, we transform this data into structured event logs suitable for analyses in process-oriented Data Science and Process Mining (PM). Our approach promotes transparency in process studies and paves the way for analyses of procedural dynamics, temporal patterns, and inefficiencies in the Italian lawmaking process. Preliminary exploratory data analyses and PM tasks demonstrate the dataset’s potential for supporting inquiries in political and legal studies.