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.

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The process of shaping the law often resembles an Indiana Jones maze. Bills and amendments run through an elaborate system of committees, sessions and hearings filled with booby traps before finally reaching the golden idol of a final approval.

Parliamentary monitoring organizations and researchers are often interested in how various pieces of legislation survive in this environment and what are the strategies to either kill or aid them. This specifically means answering two questions: What is the probability of a bill being approved and what factors determine this probability?

The legislative process is usually hierarchical: Successful completion of a step in the process is conditioned by completion of all previous steps. Therefore, we may also want to know the probabilities of completion in each consecutive step and their determinants.

A simple way how to give a satisfying answer to these questions without wandering into the land of nonlinear logistic regressions is the Sankey diagram. It is a famous flow chart in which a process is visualized using arrows. Relative quantities of outcomes in the process are represented by arrows’ widths.

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When parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs), academicians and journalists visualize parliamentary votes, they usually display results of individual votes in some colorful or interactive way. But there is much more that can be seen if the votes of individual MPs are available.

One really cool visualization that we have developed at Kohovolit.eu, and which has been featured on this blog previously, displays patterns of voting using spatial proximity. It was developed by political scientist Keith Poole to study the US Congress in multiple ways. It has been used to research other parliaments, e.x. French or Latin American, the European Parliament or the Czech parliament (see an example below), as well as to conduct comparative studies.

This visualization can be either static or animated. In the former case, it covers a long period of time (e.g. one parliamentary term). In the latter case, the term is split into shorter periods of time and changes in MPs positions between these periods are animated.

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In the first volume of this series, we saw how open data and sharing enabled one individual to bring to life political scientists’ complex information about legislative voting records.

Working with the same method of voting pattern analysis that Randall Munroe used in his datavisualization of partisanship and ideology in the U.S. Congress, Kohovolit has developed their own ways of helping citizens understand voting patterns – only for an entirely different set (really, sets) of legislators.

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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.