In almost two years since the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness was drafted, many parliamentary monitoring organizations have realized its strength as a guideline for benchmarking openness of parliamentary data in various national parliaments and some of them have developed methodologies of capturing it. There are already comparative studies ranking selected parliaments according to their adherence to at least some articles of the Declaration.
The most prominent examples include a comparative study covering several Latin American congresses by the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency that actually precedes the Declaration. Data availability of the Turkish and several Balkan parliaments was surveyed by a Serbian parliamentary monitoring organization Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability. Eastern European parliaments were also covered by a survey of the National Democratic Institute. And last but not least, a more tech-oriented methodology of data openness monitoring was developed by the Sunlight Foundation and applied to rank the US state legislatures.
Until today, however, there has been no attempt to measure parliamentary data openness on lower levels of government. At the same time, anecdotal evidence from all over the world seems to suggest that various regional and municipal parliaments and representative assemblies tend to be far less open than national parliaments.
KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization, has recently published a brand new methodology of measuring parliamentary data openness based on the Declaration and applied it to the 14 Regional Assemblies in the Czech Republic. The Czech Regions operate on the second level of government. Their population varies between 300,000 and 1,200,000 in a country of some 10 million and their combined annual budgets correspond to about 12 % of total public sector expenditures. The capital of Prague is one of the Regions.
The methodology is based on a questionnaire designed to be easily converted to survey other types of representative bodies. It captures openness of six basic types of parliamentary data: minutes from sessions, audio and video recordings, voting results, session agenda, text of legislation and information about members. In each Regional Assembly, openness of data related to plenary sessions and committee sessions is measured separately. The methodology only focuses on data proactively published on the official parliamentary website of each Region.
Data openness is broken down into three separate concepts: Quality of data captures how rich each type of data usually is (e.g. word-by-word transcripts from sessions are better than short summaries of the debate), usability of data captures how easy it is to get and re-use published data (e.g. what formats are used to publish data or whether bulk download is possible) and completeness of data describes whether all or only some data is published. Each type of data is assigned a certain number of points for each concept. These numbers are then multiplied and the product is divided by a maximum number of points. A score between 0 % (data is not published) and 100 % (perfectly open data) is obtained.
A map below shows an aggregate score of openness taken across all six types of data for every Regional Assembly in the country. As you can see, there are significant differences between Regions. The least open Regional Assembly scores 3 % while the most open one scores only 29 %, still very low compared to ideal openness of 100 %. This finding corresponds to what I was told by the Sunlight Foundation researchers about their raniking of the US state legislatures: They devised a methodology to grade each state legislature from A to F. When they crunched the numbers they realized that all the legislatures would be graded F!
To compare data openness at national and regional levels of Czech government, both chambers of the national Parliament (the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate) were surveyed as well. As you can see from charts below, the national Parliament is much more open than any of the Regional Assemblies. Also, committee sessions are always less open than plenary sessions - in some cases, names of committee members is the only information available. Moreover, data openness of plenary sessions is not very strongly correlated with data openness of committee sessions - there are Assemblies with fairly open plenary sessions and abysmally closed committee sessions.
Survey results for each representative body can be summarized via a simple scorecard visualizing most important findings regarding data quality, format and completeness. Compare two such scorecards below. The first one describes data openness in the Chamber of Deputies that scored the highest among the representative bodies compared. Data quality is relatively high, particularly in plenary sessions. Data formats are far from optimal - since data is published mostly is separate files it is difficult to download and process in bulk. In some cases, e.g. minutes or voting records from committee sessions, each document is written manually and almost completely from scratch so there is little to no standardization.
Now compare this scorecard with a scorecard for the Zlinsky Regional Assembly that scored the lowest among the representative bodies compared. As you can see, almost no information at all is proactively provided on the official website of the Assembly.
A tremendous potential of such comparative research for advocacy is obvious. Almost no public institution wants to score last in a survey like this, especially if there is a parliamentary monitoring organization capable of publicizing a lack of attempt to improve. For these reasons, I encourage such organizations everywhere to start monitoring national as well as regional representative bodies to boost effectiveness of their advocacy activities. It is my belief that the methodology presented here is a valiable resource to do this.
Kamil Gregor is a data analyst with KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization, and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.