In European political institutions, what are women in charge of? How many are in key positions? How many are in decision making roles? Out of the 28 EU members states, only two are lead by women: Germany and Poland.

While Angela Merkel is widely seen as one of the most powerful and influential politicians in the world, very few women can say the same. Openpolis, in its recent MiniDossier “Trova l’intrusa“, analyzed the role of women in political institutions across Europe and Italy. The goal was to understand how many women hold key political positions: what are women in charge of? How many are in key positions? How many are in decision making roles?

The results were very clear. The number of women in political institutions is still very low, and very few of them hold positions of power.

Even though women represent more than a third of members both in the European parliament and in the European commission (37% and 33%, respectively), both in the European Council and the Foreign Affairs Council the percentage drops to 10%. In the most important economic and financial institution of the old continent, Ecofin (Economic and Financial Affairs Council), only 8% of members are women.

In national parliaments of EU members states, men are always the majority (in best of circumstances, Sweden, women reach 44%), in 17 countries the percentage is lower than 30%, and in the governments of three countries (Greece, Slovakia and Hungary) all ministers are men. There are only three countries in which the government is half men and half women: France and Slovenia (both at 50%) and Sweden (52%). Furthermore, of the 5 women heads of state, two are so for house laws (queen Elizabeth II and Margaret II). If we consider only the heads of government, the only female colleague of Angela Merkel, is the Polish premier Beata Szydło.

In national governments, women hold 50% of labour and social affairs ministries, 43% of ministries related to family care, youth, senior citizens and sport, 40% of education and culture. At the same time, only 14% of justice ministers are women, percentage drops to 11% for finance ministries and to 7% for foreign affairs ministries. No EU country has a woman leading the ministry of economy.

This post was written by mySociety and originally appeared on their blog here. 

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A few years back, Kamil Gregor published a post under the title “Visualizing politics: Network analysis of bill sponsors”. His post, which focused on the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament, showed how basic social network analysis can support the exploration of parliamentary work, by revealing the ties that members of parliament create between each other through the co-sponsorship of private bills.

As Kamil observed, this kind of research is heavily dependent on open legislative data, which does not exist for many parliaments. There has been, however, some amount of progress in that area – and even when parliaments do not develop open data portals, they often maintain quite detailed official websites.

In what follows, I would like to quickly report on a small research project that I have developed over the years, under the name “parlnet”.

Legislative data on bill co-sponsorship

This project looks at bill co-sponsorship networks in European countries. Many parliaments allow their members to co-sponsor each other’s private bills, which makes it possible to represent these parliaments as collaborative networks, where a tie exists between two MPs if they have co-sponsored legislation together.

This idea is not new: it was pioneered by James Fowler in the United States, and has been the subject of extensive research in American politics, both on the U.S. Congress and on state legislatures. Similar research also exists on the bill co-sponsorship networks of parliaments in Argentina, Chile andRomania.

Inspired by this research and by Baptiste Coulmont’s visualisation of the French lower chamber, I surveyed the parliamentary websites of the following countries:

• all 28 current members of the European Union ;
• 4 members of the EFTA: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland

This search returned 19 parliamentary chambers from 15 countries for which it was (relatively) easy to extract legislative data, either through open data portals like data.riksdagen.se in Sweden ordata.stortinget.no in Norway, or from official parliamentary websites directly.

From legislative data to network graph

After splitting the data into legislative periods separated by nationwide elections, I was able to draw a large collection of networks showing bill co-sponsorship in these 19 chambers. Here, for instance, is the network for the Belgian lower chamber during its 51st legislature (years 2003-2007):

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Argentina, a group of NGOs and members from both houses of congress launched a working group on legislative transparency in May. Shortly after, a summit was held in Buenos Aires to showcase regional experiences regarding legislative transparency. At the summit, members of both chambers agreed to introduce legislation to modernize their access to information policies.  

In Paraguay, an access to information bill was passed in the Chamber of Deputies after a controversial amendment making it easier for the government to withhold certain types of information was removed. The bill now returns to the Senate, which passed a similar version earlier this year.

In France, Regards Citoyens and Sciences Po launched a new project, La Fabrique De La Loi, which hosts tools to analyze parliamentary debates and track the evolution of bills throughout the legislative process. The project utilizes public data in order to shed light on parliamentary procedures and their impact on the lawmaking process.

In Morocco, SimSim-Civic Participation will launch Nouabook.ma this week, Morocco’s first website to facilitate citizen engagement with parliament.

In Hungary, the government included K-Monitor on a list of “problematic” NGOs that are routinely critical of the government. The list follows a disagreement between the government and Norway Grants, the organization that funds many of the organizations, several of which were recently raided by government officials.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Portugal, a petition that began to circulate in March calls for more comprehensive information access on the voting records of Members of Parliament on the parliament’s website. While the website currently holds a record of activity for each member, determining how an individual votes for a particular measure can be difficult. The initiative is similar to another petition, that would create an electronic registry on the votes of each representative in the National Assembly. Transparencia Hackday, a Declaration endorser, has supported these measures.

In the United Kingdom, mySociety interviewed Flavio Zeni about the Akoma Ntoso metadata format for the recently launched SayIt platform (for more on Akoma Ntoso implementation around the world, see Robert Richards’ list here). mySociety reviewed the UK Parliament’s online services last month (report available here), while Computing.com recently provided a look at technology in the British Parliament, including widening access to parlaimentary information (H/T Robert Richards).

In Hungary, the Public Policy Institute (PPI) released its report on parliamentary activities in 2013, drawing attention to several important issues, including the quality of projects initiated by parliamentarians, chronic absenteeism, abuse of tacit adoption procedures, failure to exercise legislative power to rein in the executive branch, and encouragement of political migration by some parties.

In Nigeria, CISLAC outlined various advocacy positions and strategies for engagement during the recently convened National Conference. CISLAC emphasized that beyond discussing contentious historical issues at the conference, the government needed to set the agenda “inclusive, participatory democratic governance beyond 2015.”

In the United States, the Sunlight Foundation analyzed the White House Office of Management and Budget’s opposition to portions of the DATA ACT and changes to the Senate version of the bill which weaken the bills data standardization provisions. It also has continued a webinar series on enhancing transparency in political finance, with past webinars viewable here. Elsewhere, GCN profiled the GovLab and its new public interest lab network.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Spain, Qué hacen los diputados released an analysis of the parliamentary website, using the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as a base point. Qué hacen los diputados continued their series on forms of citizen participation in politics by looking at basic institutional norms of Spain’s Autonomous Communities. Fundación Ciudadana Civio reported that the new Quién Manda? platform already has 2,500 profiles and 3,200 verified relationships. Civio also published guidelines for republishing their content and projects, stating, “All of our articles are re-publishable. We do not compete with media. We want you to use our information.”

In Romania, the Institute for Public Policy called for public debate on the future of an MPs Code of Conduct, citing concerns that the current draft of the code does not take into account the perspective of civil society. The Ratiu Center for Democracy highlighted Roma activist Dr. Angela Koczi as the recipient of the Ion Ratiu Democracy Award by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

In Argentina, El Estadista published an article by the director of CIPPEC’s Local Development Program on how e-governance can help improve citizen participation. Directorio Legislativo conducted a series of interviews via Twitter with candidates from different provinces and parties in the lead up to legislative elections. The Executive Director of Directorio Legislativo wrote a guest post for the Sunlight Foundation blog, discussing the decade of struggle it took for Argentina’s Congress to publish the declarations of assets and conflicts of interests of its members.

Click here to read more.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could freely access all the relevant parliamentary information in the country we live in? Even better, wouldn’t it be great if we could easily compare and analyze all parliamentary information in the region we live in? It would allow us to learn about good practices in the region and would give us an excellent benchmark for our progress and achievements in our civic efforts aimed at opening up the parliaments. Such complex information would be a great tool that could aid in decision making in our civic activities, and would provide the evidence for our parliamentary advocacy initiatives.

Currently, no application in the region can provide us with such information - all our apps experience a language barrier when communicating with systems in other countries. Like people, apps need a language to communicate. Creating an API (application programming interface) standard would allow many apps in the region to communicate in the same language. Apps would be able to access information in other countries, and to use that information to make benchmarks and analysis. This way, we could make systematic and correct comparisons of the situation in various countries and use best practice examples to influence openness of the parliaments in our own countries.

Click here to read more.