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.

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.

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.

The information in this list was compiled by Andrew Mandelbaum with the assistance of Ariana Tuckey.

Parliaments are increasingly seeking to enable citizens to reuse, mix and republish parliamentary information, recognizing the potential of ordinary citizens to harness technology to explore and analyze data in innovative ways. A primary concern for parliaments and citizens alike is the way parliamentary information is licensed and whether or not it conforms with open data principles, such as those captured in the open definition, the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, or the 10 Principles for Opening Up Government Information. These documents encourage parliaments to publish information in machine­readable formats and to allow for citizen reuse and republication by default (recognizing that exceptions may exist in discrete and narrowly defined cases).

While many parliaments are adopting ‘open licenses’ in order to meet the open standard, others are simply placing information in the public domain. The list below describes the licensing standards that select parliaments are using to allow citizens to reuse and republish parliamentary information.

Australia

Chamber: Parliament of Australia
Website: http://www.aph.gov.au/Help/Disclaimer_Privacy_Copyright
License: Creative Commons BY­NC­ND 3.0
License Wording: Available here.

Click here to read more.

We’ve slowed down a little bit for the holidays, but expect us to ramp up activity in the new year. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a wonderful new year to all! Here’s 2012’s last update:

News in parliamentary monitoring:

In the United States, Popvox published its ‘Weekly Roundup’ of bills considered in Congress on its blog. This is a regularly published resource that Popvox offers to its readers, highlighting the topics and legislation debated in Congress in a given week. In the wake of the devastating school shooting in the U.S., Popvox also published an issue-focused blog on bills that address mental health care. Check out the Popvox blog for a vast amount of resources and good examples of how an organization uses parliamentary data.

In Ukraine, PMO community member Chesno has begun monitoring the newly elected parliament. On it’s first working day, Chesno pointed out two cases of members of parliament allowing another member to vote in their place, detailed in Chesno’s blog and covered by the news media. Chesno also plans to focus on MP attendance of committee and plenary sessions.

A member of parliament in Mexico published an opinion piece in national media calling on the Mexican Congress to adopt a digital strategy, allowing it to better engage citizens using ICTs. The article calls on parliament to adopt a policy of openness and transparency, and cites the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency’s index and the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as important tools to achieve that end. 

Mzalendo, a PMO in Kenya, published a blog post citing very low attendance rates in the Kenyan parliament as the country approaches major elections next Spring. Although parliament will be dissolved in advance of the elections, there is still important business for MPs to consider.

Click here to read more.