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Posts tagged "Open Parliamentary Information"

How to know the US Senate better through data visualization

Posted October 24, 2013 at 6:02am by gregbrownm

By: Ben Chartoff and Lee Drutman 

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The shutdown has been averted. The debt ceiling has been raised. For now.  In the process, Congress’ public approval has fallen to around 10 percent – and as low as 5 percent in one poll.

But how much do you know about who actually serves in Congress? How do you know who to even disapprove of?

Today, we unveil a new interactive tool that will allow you to get to know the U.S. Senate a little better. While it’s easy to focus on prominent Senate leaders like Harry Reid (D-Nev.) or Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) or prominent grandstanders like Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), we think it matters who our 100 senators are: What are their backgrounds? What is their education? What did they do before coming to the Senate? Who do they depend on most to support their campaigns? All of these factors shape how they collectively make decisions.

For this reason, we’ve created an interactive tool that allows you to explore the U.S. Senate. You can see how Senators break down across a wide variety of dimensions.

Click here to read more.

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What opening parliamentary information can tell us about our parliaments (Vol. 3)

Posted January 22, 2013 at 12:24pm by andrewmandelbaum

Laws assume full meaning only when the conditions surrounding their creation are understood and when placed in the context of the broader legal framework that they modify. As the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament’s 2010 World e-Parliament Report notes, “To understand the status and meaning of a bill, members and citizens need the associated reports prepared by the committees, subject experts and others; descriptions of all the actions taken on the legislation; amendments proposed and their status; links to parliamentary debate and votes on the bill, and other related material” (p. 60). But the impact of a law depends on its role within the greater body of law. In the absence of context, a law is like a puzzle piece without a puzzle.

Assembling all of these materials sounds overwhelmingly difficult. And for most of human history, it has been. The barriers to understanding legal information - check out BillTrack50 for a fun look at the most basic barrier, bill length - have rendered lawyers and legal researchers necessary in most societies, even for conducting basic legal actions, along with high-powered, high-priced legal databases.

Click here to read more.

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What opening parliamentary information can tell us about our parliaments (Vol. 2)

Posted December 10, 2012 at 2:00pm by andrewmandelbaum

Figuring out how a law changes over time can be exceedingly difficult. In Germany, as in most countries, laws are not saved in “track changes.” Rather, to determine how a law has been amended throughout its history, one must review each and every “change-law,” like this one, which simply increases the price tag on something that was 2.5 deutschmarks to 3.5 of the defunct currency. Any given law may be accompanied by hundreds - or even thousands - of change-laws documenting its modification.

Click here to read more.

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What opening parliamentary information can tell us about our parliaments (Vol. 1)

Posted November 21, 2012 at 2:20pm by andrewmandelbaum

The Declaration on Parliamentary Openness calls on parliaments to make information available “in an open and structured format… that can be read and processed by computers, so that parliamentary information can be easily reused and analyzed…” (Provision 35). To illustrate the value of open parliamentary data and potential for sharing and reuse to inform our understanding of complex data and processes, OpeningParliament.org has created the series “What Opening Parliamentary Information Can Tell Us about Our Parliaments.” To contribute, please comment below or contact us.

How has the partisan and ideological makeup of the US Congress changed over time? What events in US history caused Americans to shake up the ideological identity of their Congress and opt for a redirection of their nation’s policies?  An infographic by Randall Munroe, a small chunk of which is displayed above, helps answer these complex questions. The infographic draws on data about the votes of individual members of Congress; where an individual member sits within the ideological spectrum is based on how consistently he/she votes with his/her colleagues. Beginning in 1982, political scientists began the painstaking process of collecting the data, which dates to 1789. The political scientists enabled Randall to develop this insightful image by making the dataset publicly available in an open and structured format and enabling public reuse.

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