One of the key principles of modern democracy is accountability of elected representatives. There can be no accountability if there is no information on the representatives’ political behavior. Records of MPs’ voting in national parliaments are among the most important types of such information. If this data is not available citizens, must rely on secondary sources of information on how their parliament makes decisions, e.g. on media statements or electoral manifestos. And these sources may not always exist or correspond with reality.
With recent development of parliamentary informatics, national parliaments around the world have started to provide results of voting recorded by name. However, there are many countries even in the developed world where this is still not the case. KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization (PMO), has surveyed 193 UN member states and coded whether results of voting in their national parliaments are available on official parliamentary websites.
It should be noted that this project received no funding to peer-review the results. Therefore, the research has three major limitations:
- Data was gathered by a researcher fluent in English with an aid of the Google Translate tool for non-English speaking countries. Some parliaments were omitted because this tool does not provide translation in local languages. Given the language barrier, it is reasonable to assume many false negatives.
- The research only focuses on whether results of voting are available or not. It does not systematically survey whether all or only some voting results are published. Therefore, countries like Germany, where results of less than 10 % of all votes are published by name, scores the same as the Czech Republic, where every vote is recorded and published almost immediately.
- The research also does not systematically survey how voting results are published. In most cases, they are achieved as HTML files and displayed on the parliamentary website. In some countries, however, only PDFs can be downloaded from the websites.
Due to these severe limitations, output of this research should not be considered definitive. It should rather serve as a first step to start a conversation between researchers and local PMOs on availability of this type of parliamentary data. We will be more than happy if readers contact us to point out errors.
We found out that results of voting in national parliaments are not published in 128 countries. These countries represent more than 70 % of the world population. Parliaments in only 39 countries publish voting results by MPs’ names. This corresponds to 12 % of the world population. In additional 10 countries, only total numbers of “Yeas” and “Nays” in parliament or in parliamentary party groups are available.
There are 10 countries with bicameral parliaments where availability of voting results varies among parliamentary chambers. In these countries, lower chambers are almost always more transparent than upper chambers. This corresponds to higher relevance of lower chambers in political systems of most countries.
It is interesting that the region of Central and Eastern Europe and Western Asia, which includes most post-communist countries, is almost as transparent as Western Europe in terms of voting results availability. In the latter region, parliaments in countries like Austria or the Netherlands do not publish almost any voting results. The least transparent region is Africa where only the parliament of Kenya publishes results of voting.
It is not surprising to find out that countries rated “not free” in the 2013 Freedom House Index report do not publish results of voting in their national parliaments. The only exception is Russia. There are, however, many “partly free” countries where voting results can be accessed via official parliamentary websites.
It is important to consider how many years of voting results are published in a given country. In countries like the US, hundreds of years of voting results are available. In Spain on the other hand, voting results have only been published since 2012. A chart below shows historical record of voting results available in 61 parliamentary chambers that currently publish these results by name. It seems that the progress of opening this type of data is fairly linear since 1990.
A much more comprehensive survey of data availability should, however, be conducted. Our research largely ignores transitions from unicameral to bicameral parliaments and vice versa or events that affect political systems, e.g. revolutions, military invasions, coups d’état. It also ignores changes of format in which data is published.
KohoVolit.eu strives to create an international archive of parliamentary data. While there are many extensive archives of other types of political data, e.g. electoral results or government composition, international databases of voting results are scarce at best. We hope that the research of voting results availability is the first step to build such an archive.
Results of our analysis, charts and map presented in this article are open to re-use under the CC-BY license.
