FAQ

What is zbern.ch?

zbern.ch makes the public data of the Swiss Parliament searchable in plain language. Instead of sifting through tables and interfaces, you ask a question and get an answer, complete with charts and references to the underlying business items, speeches and votes. The project is for anyone interested in the work of Parliament: members of the public, journalists and researchers.

Can I trust the answers?

Only with reservations. zbern.ch is excellent for getting your bearings and discovering connections, but it is not an authoritative source. Specifically:

The language model can fabricate errors. Names, figures, dates or quotes can be wrong even when they sound plausible ("hallucinations").
The model only sees what the search returns. Answers are built from a full-text and meaning-based search. If the search misses a relevant business item, the model answers as if it did not exist. If something is missing from an answer, that does not mean it does not exist in Parliament.
The data is a snapshot. It reflects the state of the last update, not today.
There are gaps. For example, older popular votes (before roughly 1996) are not linked to parliamentary business items, and some supplementary details may be missing.
Translation distorts. The original texts are in German, French or Italian. The model translates and summarises, which can alter nuances.
Charts and prose can diverge. The figures in a chart come from a real query; the explanatory sentence next to it is the model's wording and may deviate.

For authoritative information, the primary source always prevails: parlament.ch, or the official publications of the Confederation.

Where does the data come from?

All content comes from publicly accessible sources:

Swiss Parliament (OData interface, parlament.ch): business items, verbatim records of debates, votes in Parliament including roll-call voting behaviour, persons, parliamentary groups, sessions and committees. This is the core of the application.
Federal Statistical Office (VoteInfo) and Swissvotes: results of federal popular votes down to municipal level, from 1981. The link between a vote and its corresponding parliamentary business item exists from roughly 1996 onwards. The vote data comes from the open government dataset of the Federal Statistical Office on opendata.swiss.
Federal Statistical Office (STAT-TAB): annual municipal statistics on demographics, age structure, employment and firms.
Federal Statistical Office (register of municipalities, regional portraits): the official register of municipalities and their area.
Swiss Federal Audit Office (SFAO), political finance: disclosed finances of parties and of campaigns for federal elections and popular votes, from 2023: total income, donations above CHF 15,000 and mandate contributions. Source: opendata.swiss.
Wikidata: supplementary information on municipalities such as elevation, official language and coordinates, where available.

The parliamentary data is subject to the terms of use of the Swiss Federal Assembly.

Which AI models are used, and what can they not do?

To understand questions and write answers we use language models from Anthropic (Claude Sonnet 5.5 for the main answer, Claude Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 4.6 for preparatory steps). For meaning-based search across the debate texts we use an embedding model from OpenAI (text-embedding-3-small). Which models are in use may change over time.

The model accesses our database in read-only mode. It cannot research the internet, cannot change any data, and gives no political opinion or voting recommendation of its own.

Who is behind the project, and how is it funded?

The operator is datadada GmbH, based in Zürich (see legal notice). zbern.ch is politically independent and not beholden to any party, parliamentary group or interest group.

Information on funding will follow.

Last updated: 17 June 2026