In my two previous contributions to this blog (see here and here) I showed how open parliamentary data can be used to gain substantive knowledge about legislative behavior. Today, I will show how to marry voting records with data on political preferences of individual elected representatives gathered for a Voting Advice Application (VVA).

In many countries, VVAs (e.g. StemWijzer, SmartVote, VoteMatch, Wahl-O-Mat, Wahlkabine) are already established as well-known tools that reduce transaction costs of making an informed decision in elections.

Their authors no longer face complains about the applications themselves but mostly about the fact that parties and candidates do not behave according to preferences they indicated in party manifestos or VAAs. I will show how to address this issue by combining voting records and VAA data in the case of the Czech Republic.

In April 2013, a newly-elected Czech senator and an unsuccessful presidential candidate Tomio Okamura established a new political party called the Dawn of Direct Democracy. He gained support of Aleš Roztočil, a deputy of a government party. Roztočil declared that he sympathizes with the party’s ideas and that he will run on the party list in the 2014 general elections.

As a presidential candidate, Tomio Okamura filled a detailed questionnaire for a Czech VAA called Volební kalkulačka developed by KohoVolit.eu. With some 1 million users the VAA became the most successful one in post-communist countries.

Since it contained as much as 63 questions, we have an excellent insight into his declared positions of a vast array of issues. Many of them are not commonly debated and therefore his positions cannot be easily found elsewhere. It’s not possible to match Okamura’s and Roztočil’s voting since Okamura has only been a senator for six months and, vice versa, it’s not possible to match VAA responses since Roztočil didn’t run for presidential elections.

When we match Okamura’s VVA respondes with Roztočil s voting record as a deputy, we find out that they are exactly opposite on many major issues that have been addressed in the legislative process since both Okamura and Roztočil entered politics. I will only mention several contradictions on issues that are among the most salient in the current Czech politics.

Okamura’s party mainly focuses on introduction of direct democracy in the Czech Republic and yet Roztočil has voted against all proposals for referenda since he was elected. Also, Okamura strongly criticizes the restitution of the Church property confiscated during the communist regime, one of the most controversial and salient issue in the Czech politics nowadays. Roztočil  however, was among deputies who consistently voted in favor of a corresponding bill proposal.

The same is true about the pension reform that Okamura called a “scam” to transfer taxpayers’ money to private financial institutions in the VAA questionnaire. Roztočil on the other hand has been voting in favor of the reform.

Moreover, the two politicians have opposing positions on the tax reform. In the VAA questionnaire he jokingly said that “it’s explosive to let a chemist run the treasure,” referencing that the Czech minister of finances who drafted the reform has a university education in chemistry. Roztočil has consistently voted in favor of the reform and against opposition’s proposals that go against it.

Despite the fact that both politicians are non-smokers, they do not agree whether smoking should be prohibited in restaurants in the Czech Republic. As a libertarian, Okamura opposes the regulation and even denies validity of medical studies linking smoking to health problems, Roztočil, being a physician, is favoring the regulation.

It can be argued that Roztočil’s voting record doesn’t match his political preferences because deputies are “whipped” by their parties to vote in line. That is certainly true to some extent. But itís also true that voters ultimately suffer not from deputies’ opinions but from their actual voting. Whipped or not, a deputy is accountable for his voting, especially if he defects to a party with demonstrably very different agenda. The discrepancy should not be dismissed so easily.

This week PMOs and MPs from Commonwealth countries will be gathering in London to discuss and make recommendations to improve the democratic functioning of Commonwealth parliaments. The study group, which is being organized by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) with the support of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the OpeningParliament.org community, will review the CPA’s Recommended Benchmarks for Democratic Legislatures in light of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness and other standards frameworks for the democratic functioning and performance of parliaments that have been adopted in recent years. The resulting recommendations will be considered for approval at the CPA’s annual conference in Cape Town in October 2013.

From the agenda:

The increasing use of technology and social media by citizens in their daily lives presents both opportunities and challenges to representative institutions. Parliaments, parliamentarians and civil society parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) are harnessing innovative technologies to reach new audiences and enhance the ability of citizens to participate in parliamentary work. Yet, parliaments often struggle to keep pace with citizen demands, arising due to the reduction of barriers to online organizing, while social media is also being used to rapidly disseminate isolated incidences of wrongdoing by individual parliamentarians — often negatively affecting public perception of parliament more broadly. This study group brings together parliamentarians and representatives of the global PMO community, which has recently released the collaboratively authored Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, to review and update the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association’s Recommended Benchmarks for Democratic Legislatures. Discussions will focus on the needs for increased parliamentary openness and strong benchmarks for individual parliamentary conduct, ethics and behavior, in order to strengthen the ability of parliaments to represent citizens in a tech-empowered world.

Read more on the CPA’s website.

Thanks to NDI project assistant Greg Brown for his help in compiling these updates. Please send us your own news — it makes these updates much easier to compile.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Mexico, apart from the Senate’s endorsement of the Declaration, a group of activists and civil society representatives presented the five winners of the #App115 contest. The initiative convinced the Congress to cancel an unnecessarily expensive contract to build an app by mobilizing hackers to build the app for almost no cost at all, saving more than 110 million pesos. Read all about the story on TechCrunch.

This week in Poland, the PMO ePanstwo Foundation re-launched their comprehensive parliamentary monitoring website, Sejmometr. Back in February, an open source version of their platform called OchParliament was made available on GitHub.

In Italy, OpenPolis has launched a campaign to lobby members of parliament to make information about committee activity available to the public.

In Lebanon, a new coalition of civil society groups was launched, the National Civil Society Parliament Liaison Unit, with the aim of making parliament more transparent and responsive to citizens.

In Ukraine, OPORA continues to fight for access to information on parliamentary staff, lodging complaints with the Ministry of Justice. Many MPs have voluntarily given information on the names of their assistants, but others still refuse. OPORA has also recently criticized parliament for their voting procedure, posting a photo of a recent voice vote on their Facebook page. In positive news, CSOs are reporting that MPs have agreed to declassify information about their wages.

Also in Ukraine, CHESNO held an open public forum to discuss the rights and responsibilities of elected representatives. CHESNO also presented their findings regarding the integrity, professionalism, and good conduct of representatives in the first 100 days of the new parliament.

In India, the media covered reports from PRS India that parliament loses more than 30 percent of its working time to disruptions.

In Egypt, the Egyptian Democracy Institute is utilizing their website, ParliamentToday.org, to provide information and analysis on parliamentary activity. The website contains detailed information about plenary and committee meetings, although the legislature does not currently release information on other things like voting record.

In Latvia, ManaBalss.lv, the platform which allows citizens to work together to draft bills that are then sent to and voted on in parliament, was featured in the New York Times. A law in Latvia passed in 2011 requires any citizen-drafted initiative that receives signatures from 10,000 people aged 16 or older to be taken up by parliament.

In Pakistan, the PMO PILDAT filed a request to the Ombudsman of Pakistan for the release of attendance records for MPs in the National Assembly, arguing that the attendance records do not constitute “excluded information” in the 2002 Freedom of Information Law. PILDAT also launched its Citizen Report, which examines parliamentary proceedings from early 2008 through March of 2013.

In Tunisia, Selim Kharrat is the Executive Director of Al Bawsala, a PMO that seeks to inform citizens on the activities of the parliament. In this interview with Nawaat.org, Kharrat discusses the philosophy and strategy of Al Bawsala as well as the organization’s role in the larger OpeningParliament movement.

In Switzerland, Politinetz developed a great visualization for votes and absences in the Swiss parliament. The project won a data journalism award and has been featured on the parliament’s own website.

Other related news:

The Declaration on Parliamentary Openness was featured in a post in The Pirate Times.

In Uruguay, Fabrizio Scrollini from DATA Uruguay published an article detailing the Uruguayan experience with the Open Government Partnership.

In the Philippines, the House of Representatives recently approved a bill that seeks to generate greater citizen and CSO participation in the formulation of government plans. The bill also requires that all economic development plans be made available to the public.

In South Africa, many in civil society protested after the passage of a ‘secrecy bill.’ A number of voting discrepancies were outlined later in a report.

In China, civil society is increasingly trying to influence the legislative process, a system that has historically been a mere formality where citizen or CSO participation was minimal. The Nature Reserve Legislation Group has recently submitted a cooperatively drafted Nature Reserve Law to the National People’s Congress for consideration.

In Uganda, civil society groups are calling for a more inclusive budgeting process, including more comprehensive debate in the parliament that incorporates citizen voices and CSOs.

In Estonia, the Citizen Parliament published a series of 15 proposals for the national parliament to take under consideration.

In the UK, the National Health Service Future Forum is utilizing innovative strategies to listen to citizens’ concerns, thoughts, and recommendations. The listening activities include web chats, physical meetings, and responding to comments on web pages.

Resources:

The Inter-Parliamentary Union recently released a new set of guidelines for social media usage by parliaments. The document provides strong examples, outlines basic principles, and offers some advice regarding the future of social media engagement.

The Hansard Society released a report evaluating the future of parliamentary communications, citing the increased influence of social media and mobile technology in changing how citizen consume information. The report makes recommendations as to how parliaments can keep pace with these changes in communication.

Andrew Mandelbaum of the National Democratic Institute and Melissa Ortiz Massó of the Mexican PMO Fundar were interviewed by the Center for Public Policy PROVIDUS on goals for the Declaration and its role in the global PMO community.

Events:

In Uruguay, DATA is hosting a Latin American regional conference on Open Data from June 26-27. Check out the conference’s website here.

The Open Government Partnership’s hosted a webinar on Citizen Engagement on Lawmaking, featuring NDI’s Andrew Mandelbaum and the developer of the Brazilian legislature’s e-Democracia platform, Cristiano Ferri Faria, on April 25. More info here.

Recent blog posts:

Detecting “dirty tricks” in the Czech parliament with open data (May 4)

The Senate of Mexico endorses the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness (Apr 30)