Parliamentary monitoring organizations are generally very good at gathering, opening and republishing parliamentary data. Stories about actual social change that can be directly linked to their work are, however, much more rare. This makes a recent development in the Czech Republic all the more interesting.

Every vote taken during plenary sessions in the Czech parliament is by default recorded by names of individual MPs. Voting results are published in real time on the parliamentary website and the lower chamber also provides open voting data. This creates ample opportunities to do research on voting patterns but also allows KohoVolit.eu, a local parliamentary monitoring organization to track MPs attendance.

Results consistently show that MPs with the lowest attendance are almost invariably those that also hold top offices in the national or local government. For example, the chart below visualizes attendance rates of Czech members of the lower chamber since the last parliamentary elections in October 2013. Members of the cabinet (in red) are almost all among the MPs with low attendance rates.

In 2013, KohoVolit.eu tracked an MP with the lowest overall attendance that also managed to simultaneously hold over 30 offices (!). It turned out that some 50 % of his absences in parliament can be explained by him being at an event related to his extra-parliamentary offices (including e.g. christening a new fire truck or opening a vine festival).

Understandably, quite a large media attention to this issue accumulated over time. This has led to some MPs reducing the number of offices they hold (including the MP mentioned above). But most importantly, the Social Democrats (the strongest government party) recently (August 2014) announced results of an inter-party referendum where over 90 % of its voting members endorsed the party to propose a bill that would prevent MPs to hold multiple offices at the same time.

If this bill is indeed approved it will be among the cases where open parliamentary data clearly led to a positive social change and possibly an example for other parliamentary monitoring organizations to follow.

Kamil Gregor is a data analyst with KohoVolit.eu and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Germany, the Open Knowledge Festival took place in Berlin from July 15-17. A good summary of the event can be viewed here. Members of the OpeningParliament.org community that attended include Foundation ePaństwo, DATA Uruguay, Sunlight Foundation, Fundar, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, KohoVolit, K-Monitor, Holder de Ord, Hvem Stemmer Hvad, Open Ministry, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, Open State Foundation, Open North, OpenKratio, Hasadna, mySociety, and Access Info.

Elsewhere, Parliament Watch recently announced an online survey that documents the positions of Germany’s 96 MEPs on important policy issues. In addition to the survey, the organization also collected voting behavior of the elected officials during the last parliamentary term.

In Greece, the Ministry of Administrative Reform and E-Government submitted the country’s Action Plan to the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The plan contains ambitious commitments on parliamentary openness and legislative transparency, including the introduction of a system for tracking bill changes, improvements in the usability and functionality of the parliament’s website, provision of historical parliamentary documents, and enhancements of social media policy.

In Ireland, the government launched data.gov.ie, an open data portal that currently supports 419 datasets. The Minister of Public Education and Reform announced the end of application fees for FOI requests. And the government approved the country’s Action Plan for OGP which includes several components to increase citizen participation during the pre-legislative process through consultation with committees and scrutiny of draft bills.

In France, Regards Citoyens initiated a crowdsourcing project that converted declarations of interests for all 925 MPs into open data. The declarations were previously scanned into PDFs by the High Authority on Transparency in Public Life (HATVP). The conversion of these files to open data brings the declarations into line with standards established in October 2013 by France’s law on the transparency of public life.

In Italy, OpenPolis and others have been drawing attention to the country’s need for an FOI law with the #FOIA4Italy campaign. Despite the growing momentum around FOI in recent years, there has been a lack of progress on the issue in parliament. FOIA4Italy plans to submit an FOIA bill based on legislation in countries with advanced access to information laws after crowdsourcing improvements from the Italian public.

In Tunisia, Al Bawsala unveiled a new project, Marsad Baladia, a platform that will monitor the activities of municipalities to generate greater citizen awareness before municipal elections scheduled for 2015. The project has already created a transparency index from the 24 municipalities it has so far observed.

Click here to read more.

Some time ago, I surveyed all national parliaments in the world to see whether they record and publish results of plenary voting. In this post, I look at how exactly parliamentary voting data is provided. I also collected information about as much parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) as I could find and to see whether and how they help open voting data up.

My sample includes 283 legislative chambers from 200 jurisdictions, mostly UN member states and some other territories (e.g. Taiwan, Hong Kong). There are two nation states included that no longer exist but voting results from their parliaments are still around: Czechslovakia (1991-1992) and the Fourth French Republic (1946-1958).

A chart below shows that knowing how your MPs decide is sadly still relatively rare worldwide. Only 90 legislative chambers publish at least some voting results. Moreover, many of these chambers publish results of very few votes. For example, about 20 votes per year are recorded in German Bundestaag while the number is well over 2,000 in the Czech Chamber of Deputies where every vote is taken as a roll call by default. Transparency of voting is generally lower in Africa and Asia and among non-democratic countries. But even in some old democracies, almost no voting data exist (e.g. in Austria, France, New Zealand or the Netherlands).

Click here to read more.

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.

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.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In India, national elections closed on May 16, with Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party anticipated to win more than the 272 seats required for a parliamentary majority. In advance of the election, Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) developed report cards for members of the Lok Sabha. The report cards provide citizens with information gathered through the Right To Information Act and other government websites and assess MP performance on factors like attendance and efforts to introduce new development within their districts. See here for more information on SNS’ methodology.

Last month, PRS Legislative Research provided a historical comparison of the number of bills passed to ordinances declared during each Lok Sabha since 1952.

In Chile, delegates from 27 countries gathered in Santiago on April 29-30 for the first Poplus Conference, organized by mySociety and Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente. Participants shared goals for the future of the Poplus network, a nascent project with the goal to create and share open source code that helps civic organizations around the world.

In the European Union, voting for European Parliamentary elections will take place May 22-25. Election results will be available in open data format, allowing interested users to retrieve raw data, use filters to present the information in custom ways, and publish it on their own online platforms.

In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Kohovolit.eu launched an election calculator for the European Parliament that allows users to browse voting data of European MPs from 2009 to 2014. The calculator allows users to curate the data by selecting issues important to them and reviewing how closely the voting records of different EMPs match their views.

Click here to read more.

An international consensus on standards for democratic parliaments has only recently begun to emerge over the last decade. As one component of these standards, the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness provides a useful framework for both CSOs and parliaments to assess legislative information management practices and other aspects of legislative openness. While members of parliament (MPs) who adopt resolutions to support the Declaration’s principles take the important step of shifting their parliament towards a culture of openness, citizens are able to utilize the Declaration to raise awareness and advocate for greater transparency on specific issues.

There are several recent examples of parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) using the Declaration’s principles as benchmarks to evaluate their respective parliaments. This strategy benefits from the legitimacy that an internationally endorsed set of standards lends to national advocacy efforts. Moreover, with every new analysis that’s framed using the Declaration, PMOs increase the growing body of comparative information available on parliamentary transparency and encourage others to undertake further analyses.

In Portugal, the PMO Transparência Hackday is the latest to provide an analysis of a national parliament using principles from the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as benchmarks. Transparência’s research looks at the Declaration’s 44 principles in light of Portugal’s parliamentary practices, records whether each principle is complied with or not, and provides additional explanation and links to where this information can be found.

Transparencia Hackday analyzes the Portuguese Parliament based on the provisions of the Declaration.

The simplicity and reproducibility of this analysis are notable. The resulting series of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses to the availability of specific information quickly draws attention to those aspects of information access where parliaments can improve and areas where they are succeeding and may offer positive examples to other parliaments. This approach also benefits from its objective frame: the resulting analysis is like a series of check marks, the accuracy of which can be maintained by crowdsourcing additional information (for instance, Transparência Hackday welcomes others to provide feedback on their analysis directly on their wiki).

Click here to read more.