Legislative behavior in the French Senate: A new dataset from the Fifth Republic

This research note presents a new dataset on the French Senate. We provide demographic (1968–2017) and electoral (1983–2020) data for all Senate districts, biographical and political characteristics for all senators who served during the Fifth Republic (1959–2017), and data on roll-call votes (RCVs), individual senator's votes in relation to them, and the corresponding bill content (1996–2017). In this note, we describe the structure of our datasets, provide descriptive information on key variables, highlight temporal shifts in ideological trends in the French Senate, and discuss possible future research topics. We anticipate these data will make an important addition to the rapidly growing literature on upper chambers and legislative dynamics.