Interviewer questions in political interviews with politicians and experts in Terzake

The materials in this dataset consist of 307 ‘question turns’, i.e., turns taken by interviewers to ask interviewees a question or confront them with a statement. The question turns were taken from interviews in Terzake, a Flemish current-affairs programme that specialises in interviews with politicians and experts.
The interviews selected for the study for which the dataset was compiled centre on two topics: the 2019-2020 Belgian federal government formation and the Covid-19 pandemic in the context of Belgium. The data were extracted and transcribed manually from the videos posted on the VRT website.
For ‘formation’ interviews, 150 question turns were gathered spanning the period from election day on 26 May 2019 until the inauguration of the new government on 1 October 2020. The data extraction has a balanced distribution of interviews with leftist, centrist and rightist politicians.
For the ‘Covid’ interviews, the 157 selected question turns date from the period between the announcement of the first strict ‘Covid’ measures on 13 March 2020 until the announcement of the first (cautious) relaxations of the measures on 15 April 2020. For the 'Covid' data, a distinction was made between interviews with politicians and experts. Though we aimed at an equal distribution of politician-directed and expert-directed question turns, interviews with experts were more frequent. The resulting ‘Covid’ dataset consists of 74 politician-directed and 83 expert-directed question turns.