News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Montenegro, the Center for Democratic Transitions (CDT) was selected as one of the four winners of the UNDP competition “Technology for Citizen Engagement.” The award provides small grants to support ideas for using technology to expand opportunities for citizen engagement. CDT’s  winning idea was Ask for Data, a tool that will allow citizens to easily request information from public institutions.

In Kenya, Muslims for Human Rights released a video raising awareness about the right to know how MPs are spending constituency development funds. The constituency development fund, which is intended to support development projects in MPs’ constituencies, lacks meaningful oversight.

In Greece, Vouliwatch recently released its first annual report, highlighting the role of digital technology in allowing citizens to follow parliamentary issues, ask questions to MPs, and to share ideas and proposals. The organization also announced that it will begin to provide information about the activities, discussions, and decisions of the European Parliament related to Greece and other key policy issues.

In Pakistan, Pakistan Institute for Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT) released two scorecards measuring the quality of governance at the federal and provincial levels of government.   

In Chile, Chile Transparente released a report on the transparency of political parties. The report concludes that although there was overall improvement compared to previous years, political parties still have weak programmatic and financial transparency.

In Georgia, Jumpstart Georgia’s Gender Pay Game was selected as a finalist for the Data Journalism Awards 2015. Winners will be announced during the Data Journalism Awards Ceremony at the General Editors Network Summit in Barcelona on June 18.

In Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, and Nigeria, Open Knowledge and Code for Africa announced the 2015 cohort of Open Government Fellows. The new fellows will promote increased government transparency and improved dialogue between citizens and governments.

In Europe, more than 100 groups issued a letter to urge the European Commission to make the lobby register legally binding. The letter also calls on the Commission to ban meetings with unregistered lobbyists and to allocate appropriate resources for monitoring and enforcement of this rule.

In Kuwait, Kuwait Transparency Society celebrated its 10th Anniversary.

In Mexico, the Senate, in cooperation with the National Democratic Institute, hosted a three day workshop on Promoting Legislative Transparency. The training covered several tools and methodologies to improve civil society’s capacity to use data to monitor parliamentary activities.  

Click here to read more.

In the previous blogpost in this two-part series about visualizing parliamentary votes, I wrote about how various parliaments and parliamentary monitoring websites go about showing results of vote events in national parliaments. In this instalment, I will introduce a set of tools developed by KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization to do this simply, effectively and attractively.

Our visualization of a single vote event is simple enough:

It’s a hemicycle where legislators are represented by small figures and their voting options are displayed either using a small symbol (in this case an asterisk) or using a background colour of the hemicycle. The visualization is of course interactive and you can get it either via GitHub or an online generator.

What if we want to show how legislators voted on multiple occasions or even on all the vote events during a parliamentary term simultaneously? This is possible using the principal component analysis (specifically, a model developed by Michal Škop). This statistical method returns a scatterplot where every legislator is represented by one point:

Click here to read more.

Many parliamentary monitoring organizations are in business of visualizing parliamentary votes – either because they collect voting data themselves or because they want to show how legislators decide in more informative and appealing ways than a simple list of legislators and votes they cast.

In this two-part blogpost, I want look at how this can be done as effectively as possible. The first part will review existing solutions employed by national parliaments and parliamentary watchdogs over the globe and the second part will showcase a solution that we have recently developed in KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization.

Parliaments themselves are pretty much terrible when it comes to visualizing voting results. Not only that, a recent global survey shows that they often fail at recording or publishing parliamentary votes in the first place – out of some 280 parliamentary chambers of sovereign nation states, only about 70 of them publish voting results by names of individual legislators.

The parliaments that do publish voting results almost always limit themselves to showing only a list of legislators’ names and votes. In many cases, their party membership is not included which seriously limits re-usability of this information, especially if legislators often switch their parties and/or when webpages or PDF files with voting results do not link to additional details about individual legislators.

There are parliamentary chambers that include at least some graphical features that help users quickly discern how individuals and parties voted, e.g. the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament:

There are parliaments that attempt to go beyond listing legislators and their votes and use charts and other graphical features to show various characteristics of the vote. For example, the German Bundestag uses coloured circles to represent quantities of legislators.

Other parliamentary chambers, such as the National Assembly of the French Parliament, employ bar or pie charts to show relative quantities of legislators that select various voting options:

Other examples of this solution include the Danish Folketing, the Russian Duma, the Spanish Chamber of Deputies, the Mexican Senate or the Lower House of the Parliament of Ireland.

It is obvious from these examples that visualizing results of one vote event is not as simple as it may seem. There are actually several types of information involved and one would ideally want to find a solution that simply and effectively displays all of them.

Click here to read more.

KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization, has developed a new application that allows users to store, visualize, and analyse parliamentary votes. The idea came when we were approached by the Green Circle, an environmental organization that has been tracking parliamentary voting related to environmental protection in the Czech Parliament since 1993 and producing regular reports on how eco-friendly individual MPs vote. Over the course of the years, their expertise generated a unique substantive insight into political preferences of MPs but it largely remained stuck in overcomplicated Excel sheets or even on paper. They asked us to design a portal to open up this information.

The collaboration resulted in so called “Parliamentary Tree-Frog” (Parlamentní rosnička) – a first instance of the new application. In European folklore, the tree-frog (Hyla arborea) is associated with predicting the weather and is also among animal species that are the most endangered by damaging the environment, hence the name of the portal. When developing the application, we were inspired and used some of the open code of the Scoring the European Parliament project.

The application is essentially a tool for visualizing results of so called interest group ratings. Such ratings are created by interest groups (e.g. political watchdogs, trade unions, employers’ associations) that select important parliamentary votes in a narrowly defined policy area (e.g. environmental protection, human rights, taxation, various social issues), determine how MPs should have voted in order to promote a desired outcome (in this case environmental protection) and then rank MPs based on how closely their actual voting behaviour matched this optimal voting record. These ratings are still relatively rare in Europe but there have been dozens of them in the U.S., some of them active since 1970s. Most of the major U.S. interest group ratings are aggregated on the Vote Smart project website.

The application calculates a rating – based on some 250 eco-friendly votes to date – simply as a percentage of all instances when an MP voted in line with environmental protection out of all votes when he or she was present in the Parliament. Differences in values of the rating among parties and changes over time are visualized on the main page where users can also select specific parties, terms or votes and perform search queries:

Click here to read more.

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.

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A recent survey on parliamentary data openness in Central and Eastern Europe shows that national parliaments in the region especially lack transparency of committees’ sessions. Transcripts of sessions, voting records or even sessions’ agenda are unavailable in many countries. The survey clusters the countries into two groups, with Czech Republic, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia and Slovakia being moderately open and Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo being much more closed.

Some time ago, I presented results of a global survey on voting data availability by KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization (PMO). Recently, there has been another development in parliamentary data openness monitoring. NDI’s Western Balkan Legislative Strengthening Initiative conducted a comprehensive survey of nine Central and Eastern European parliaments. It is unique in many ways, mainly because the survey questionnaire was filled by parliamentary researches and not by PMOs, as it is usually the case.

The survey was based on the Declaration of Parliamentary Openness and focused on opportunities of citizens’ participation in the legislative process and parliamentary data openness. This section of the questionnaire contains questions on whether 48 types of parliamentary data are available on the official parliamentary website. It does not ask any further details (e.g. how many years of data are available or in what formats) and some questions could be more specific (e.g. whether voting records are available by name of individual MPs) but it draws a good rough picture of parliamentary openness in the region.

Click here to read more.