Through quantitative and qualitative elements, we looked at the work of Deputies and Senators of the Italian parliament to assess their political and legislative efficiency. The 2016 edition of the index of parliamentary productivity highlights even more the importance of specific key positions in parliament.

Index of parliamentary productivity. The first release in 2011 was the result of a urgent need to add a qualitative element in the assessment of the activity of elected representatives. Newer editions kept the original structure of the index, while trying to identify the main changes, both political and procedural, that took place with the following grand coalition governments.

The distribution of productivity. There are many points worth mentioning when analyzing the activity of the Italian parliament. First, the distribution of productivity is not homogeneous. Out of approximately 950 members of parliament, the vast majority have a little role in the legislative production of the two chambers. Most of them usually limit their contributions to attendance at voting sessions, an element that is not sufficient to achieve a high score in the index.

The importance of key positions. A high attendance rate does not equal a high score in the index of parliament productivity. What seems to really have an impact is the role or position held in parliament. Through our years of work on the index we discovered that specific key positions have more chances to influence legislative work. We are mainly talking about presidents and vice presidents of parliamentary committees and the chairman of each political group. These people usually end up being spokesmen/rapporteurs for the most important bills being discussed in parliament.

Ranking. The goal of this study is not to determine winners or losers, rather to create tools to better understand how the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate actually work. In this year’s edition of the index of parliamentary productivity, we attempted to further our analysis of key positions, adding to the previous study of single MPs. We calculated the average score of each group, as well as the difference between members that have a key role and those that do not.

Daily updates. The MiniDossier analyzed parliamentary data up until November 21, 2016. The score and general activity of each member of parliament is updated on a daily basis at: www.openparlamento.it.

For more information, please see the parameters used to calculate the index of parliamentary productivity.

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.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Ghana, CDD Ghana organized a meeting of African parliamentary monitoring organizations that focused on regional approaches to parliamentary monitoring and considered how a regional network of parliamentary openness advocates and champions can be most effectively leveraged to advance legislative transparency and citizen participation.

Also in Ghana, the Parliament of Ghana in collaboration with Penplusbytes and with support from the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) launched the “Connecting Citizens to Parliament” digital platform. The project aims to provide citizens with another avenue through which they can engage with MPs and monitor government performance on certain issues. Citizens can engage with members on the web-platform or via SMS, mobile app, or social media.

In Morocco, the country’s first web platform for public engagement with parliament is off to a strong start. Nouabook has built a solid user base and a number of MPs are responding to citizens’ questions on the platform. Over 40% of the questions posted on the platform have been answered by the member of parliament in question.

In Italy, OpenPolis and ActionAid launched a web-based advocacy tool called U-Act that allows citizens to enter into a dialogue with policy makers. U-Act allows users to submit and support new ideas, which are then sent to members of parliament.

In Kenya, a joint initiative of the Parliamentary Initiatives Network in partnership with and Transparency International Kenya, Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice (KPTJ) and Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG) recently came out with a study titled, “Towards Hazy Horizons.” The study found that that the slow pace of institutional reform and low levels of public awareness and engagement is slowing the implementation of constitutional provisions in chapter six of the constitution.  

In the UK, mySociety is helping constituents track how responsive their MP is on WriteToThem, a tool that allows users to quickly look up who represents them and send those representatives a message. Here, mySociety ranks MPs based on how responsive they were to messages sent using the tool. Some MPs have responded only a handful of times while others have responded to all messages sent over WriteToThem.

Click here to read more.

Openpolis, a political watchdog in Italy, published a “MiniDossier” that uses data journalism to analyze gender equality in Italy. The main focus of the work is on the distribution of leadership roles between men and women.

Two different topics of interest were taken into consideration: positions in the national government and boards of listed companies, both of which have seen recent debate on whether or not to implement gender quotas.

These examples are quite indicative and relevant, especially because politicians used different methods and instruments to achieve greater equality, obtaining, as we will see, opposite results.

Considering the composition of his government, new President of the Council of Ministers Matteo Renzi announced that his Cabinet was going to achieve full gender equality: half men and half women.

Renzi’s press office gave lots of attentions to this announcement, as if we were witnessing a game changing decision that was made without the pressure of laws or gender quotas.

But how did things actually turn out? Did Renzi manage to keep his promise? A simple graph gives a clear answer: no.

Click here to read more.

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 Paraguay, the President of the Senate signed a cooperation agreement with Semillas para la Democracia and the National Democratic Institute, agreeing to collaborate on developing initiatives to increase legislative transparency. The agreement includes a commitment from the Senate to strengthen legislative measures against corruption and to help build the capacity of civil society to monitor its work.

In South Africa, People’s Assembly launched the Members Interests Browser, which tracks data on MPs’ interests. Its features enable greater analysis than the PDF files published by Parliament, including features that allow users to filter and count interest declarations and explore the third parties referred to in declarations.

In Italy, OpenPolis published an Index of Parliamentary Productivity for 2014 that assesses the efficacy of MPs in performing parliamentary duties and passing legislation.

In Jordan, the Al-Hayat Center’s RASED Program released its first weekly report on the 2nd Ordinary Session of Jordan’s Parliament. Among other items, it drew attention to MPs attempting to form parliamentary committees outside official parliamentary procedures, which stipulate that the executive office appoints committees based on proportional representation of parliamentary blocs.

In Spain, Access Info Europe outlined a series of concerns about the Council of Transparency and Good Governance, a new body tasked with upholding governmental transparency requirements and citizens’ right of access to public information. Additionally, Access, Que Hacen Los Diputados, and CIVIO are calling for the immediate implementation of a law on public access to information, following the recent discovery that several MPs have used public funds to pay for personal travel.  

In Nigeria, the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre participated in a forum at the National Assembly focused on the need to generate greater engagement between civil society and the legislature on four thematic issues, including local government autonomy, government/CSO relations, minimum wages, and the 2015 general elections.

Click here to read more.

This post was written by Jen Bramley of mySociety and originally appeared on the Poplus blog here. 

We recently held a call for proposals - we had several grants of up to USD $5,000 available to help fund projects which made use of a Poplus Component, or proposed a completely new one. The recipients have been chosen, and I thought I’d share with you the Poplus Governance Committee’s decisions. Here’s what we’ll be funding:

Project 1:

Group & Country: Sinar Project, Malaysia
Proposal: Using PopIt and potentially TrackIt (or another similar accountability Component) monitor politicians in Malaysia and display their details.
Problem: There is no single public API or reference database for current and past electoral candidates and representatives in Malaysia. Several civil society and media organisations each have their own copy, but they differ in quality, format and completeness.
Solution: To build a database on PopIt of current and past electoral candidates and representatives, which will then be used as lookup reference for a public corruption database, in partnership with local media and transparency organisations.
What they want the money for: 1) The creation of a database of people, organisations (political parties/government departments/ministries) and their positions/memberships. At the least this will include all people/parties from the past three elections, so about one to two thousand entries. 2) The publication of accountable Malaysian issues, parsed from public Auditor General reports dating back three to five years.
Amount awarded: $5,000

Click here to read more.