In the first volume of this series, we saw how open data and sharing enabled one individual to bring to life political scientists’ complex information about legislative voting records.

Working with the same method of voting pattern analysis that Randall Munroe used in his datavisualization of partisanship and ideology in the U.S. Congress, Kohovolit has developed their own ways of helping citizens understand voting patterns – only for an entirely different set (really, sets) of legislators.

Here’s how Kohovolit puts it:

This simple website shows a visualization of voting patterns in various legislative bodies in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and former Czechoslovakia. The distance between a pair of MPs corresponds to the similarity of their voting records – if two MPs voted always exactly the same they would occupy the same spot in the space. The method used to compute the positions is weighted multidimensional scaling.

To create the visualization, you need a dataset of voting records. Without open data, you either have to scrape the votes from a parliamentary website, which requires a scraper developer, or you have to ask the parliament for the records and that could be costly or time-consuming. If the data is open, all it takes is a person skilled in [spreadsheet] editor, a statistical software that calculates the distances between MPs and Google Motion Charts!

Thanks to the visualization, we can see how political party system was established in both countries in early 1990s, we can check whether coalition agreements corresponded with actual voting patterns in various periods of time, or we can identify how non-affiliated MPs change their voting behaviour over time. Overall, we gain a great deal of knowledge over what is actually going on in the Parliament!

And all this is thanks to open data.

In this example, translated into English, Kamil Gregor of Kohovolit points out that one can see how after a split in the VV party group led the VVs into the opposition, their former colleagues (LIDEM) stayed in government. Gregor calls some of the independent MPs “the hobbits” because they journey from “there and back” (government to opposition) time and again.

In addition to making useful datavisualizations, Kohovolit has been advocating for improved access to open parliamentary information using the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. This has contributed to an improved relationship with parliamentary staff, who, we previously reported, released voting records and more after Kohovolit and a coalition of supporters sent them the Declaration. Recently, when a spreadsheet of roll call votes maxed out at 1,000,000 rows, Kohovolit helped the staff troubleshoot the problem. A small, but crucial, victory for Czech citizens.