Is your organization monitoring attendance of MPs? Compare attendance rates in your country with rates from as much as 33 parliaments!
KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization has been publishing regular reports on attendance rates in Czech and Slovak parliaments. This is one of the most common activity that PMOs do. Although we had some success (e.g. when we scraped an online calendar of an MP with low attendance and were thus able to account for 50 % of his absence), these reports became rather repetitive. Attendance is usually very stable over time so the topic could cease to be interesting for journalists and citizens after a while.
When we were looking for ways how to spice it up it occurred to us that it would be great if we were able to compare attendance of our MPs with their colleagues from other parliaments. Journalists love such international comparisons and citizens are often very receptive to reports of their country being in some respect worse then its neighbours. So if your organization also informs about MPs attendance I strongly suggest to try the same.
Thanks to new developments in standardizing and gathering voting data (especially by a new federation of expert and organizations called Poplus) it has became possible for me to create a rather comprehensive archive of voting results in national and regional legislatures. Some datasets come from national parliaments that provide data dumps (e.g. Bulgarian, Czech, German), some from parliamentary monitoring organizations and experts that scrape voting data (e.g. Canadian Open North, Israeli Open Knesset, Norwegian Holder de ords, Czech and Slovak KohoVolit.eu) and some from academicians (e.g. John Carey, Keith Poole and Simon Hix, Abdul Noury and Gerard Roland).
The chart below visualizes attendance rates in 33 national parliaments. These are average rates taken across all MPs and all votes in a given period of time. In bicameral parliaments (e.g. Brazil, Canada, USA), these are rates for the lower chamber. It should be noted that in many parliaments, results of only some (and sometimes only very few) votes are published so the rates can be skewed. This is especially the case of Germany, Italy or Philippines where only final votes on bill proposals are recorded. I believe, however, that the chart is still useful for a rough comparison.
As far as I know, this is the most comprehensive comparison to date. I am expecting to receive more voting data soon so the chart will be updated with rates from other countries, namely: former Czechoslovakia (1990-1992), Honduras, Serbia, Switzerland. I would very much appreciate any feedback on these rates, especially from experts on parliaments included. For example, I was rather surprised to find out that Scandinavian parliaments exhibit relatively low attendance and I have no idea why. Also, if you happen to have any raw voting data or attendance rates let me know!
Kamil Gregor is a data analyst with KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization, and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.
