What is public about parliamentary decision-making in Europe?

Public accountability is the cornerstone of any functioning democracy. Citizens should be able to easily look up legislation or parliamentary debates, and monitor their representatives,  if they want to. In the 21st century, technology created an opportunity for any political body to share its work with the broader public. Indeed, since the mid-2000s it is absolutely feasible for any assembly to have a full, digitised record of their work, including parliamentary proceedings, legislative proposals or votes. To their credit, all of the assemblies we examined have a broadcast of plenary sessions available online. However, committee proceedings and voting records are not available in most cases, making it difficult to follow the developments of legislative proceedings.

Australia is a prime example of how good broadcasting can be done, even though this may sound surprising. In fact, since 1901, all of its parliamentary debates, including notices of noise, interruptions or any out-of-agenda events, have been transcribed and categorised for research. It is also possible to surf any corresponding legislations, amendments, voting records and committee transcripts since the beginning of the 20th century and, since 2000, to follow all plenary and committee debates online. Another good example is the European Parliament, which developed its own, purpose-specific streaming service and has tools, such as the legislative train, which make the progression of laws very easy to follow, even for those not very well wested in EU politics. The EP also has committee votes and some plenary votes available, so you can see how your MEPs vote, and MEP profiles make it easy to see which debates a politician has spoken in, or which the legislations they have supported.

Why is this important?

Before we move on to less good practices, it is important to explain why exactly we need such resources. Arguably, the average citizen will probably not watch plenary sessions of any assembly. Plenaries are often a bit technical, and monotonous, and can last around 12 hours, making them unsuitable to serve as entertainment for most. But for journalists, civil society activists and researchers, these resources provide an irreplaceable tool to do their job. From a journalistic point of view, a well-organised and easy-to-search website connecting debates, proposal texts, press statements or expert reports can make the difference between reporting on a relevant development or missing it entirely. Activists and advocates of causes need detailed records of issues and proceedings relevant to their cause to be able to engage meaningfully. Researchers and social scientists may be the toughest crowd to please. For most people working with quantitative data, meaning numbers and statistical methods, data does not only need to be available, but it is also important for websites to support web scraping methods, so researchers can collect data in large quantities. The European Parliament can also be taken as a good example in this sense, with all of its websites supporting easy scraping and data collection since around 2017.

What can be missing?

Our research has shown that the most common two things to be missing are records of votes and records of committee proceedings. In terms of voting, roll-call votes, votes using machines that record which MP voted how, are not used very often. The first, and least common reason for this, is that the rules for some policies require voting to be anonymous. There are mixed systems, such as Poland, Czechia, Bulgaria and Hungary, as well as partially the EP, where voting tends to happen through machines, but a number of policy areas and decisions, such as appointments, require secret votes. There are a few more countries where anonymous voting exists, but only in special cases. Interestingly, the most common reason why there are no voting records is that assemblies use some traditional methods, such as raising hands, standing up, or shouting out votes, which don’t get recorded. Lately, more and more countries are trying to phase out old-school voting methods, but according to this 2012 report, paper ballots, raising hands, shouting out votes, and standing up still exist and are in use at least occasionally, if not even frequently. Even where votes are well-recorded, such as in the UK, NGOs still feel the need to create a more accessible format of voting records, as the official records are tough to access. For example, we tried to look into the records of Italy, a country that successfully transferred from using outdated methods to working almost entirely electronically, but after hours of searching we could not find the location of records on their government websites, which is an issue in itself.

While plenary sessions are streamed almost everywhere, committee sessions are not, or not entirely. We only found five countries, Australia, Canada, Denmark, France and Italy, where committees are recorded with the exact same frequency and quality as plenaries. In many other countries, some committee sessions may be public but do not get transcribed, whereas in others only special ones are public, but reports are produced, even if not in detail. But the overall takeaway is that it requires excessive familiarity to keep up with where and how one may be able to engage with the activity of committees, and crucial bodies for approving and amending legislation, which decreases transparency. 

Another set of glitches we spotted concerns the designated government websites. We already mentioned our struggles with the Italian site, but it’s far from the worst we have seen. The Hungarian site, for one, often produced error messages when we tried to access live broadcasts and currently, the opening site has a message encouraging users to use Firefox to make sure the system works, and has an alternative link in case Firefox fails. In the defence of Hungary, they also offer the live stream on Youtube, and they are by far not the only country with a glitchy, or entirely Youtube-based system.

The last issue arose regarding Hungary, but it turned out to be a universal problem across almost all countries: the English version of websites. English content is almost always significantly slimmer than native language content. Obviously, this can be overcome by using translation software on the native language websites, but if one naively visits the English version, they may get anything from missing content to completely different content.

Overall, while parliaments around the world try to be transparent, they may often make life somewhat difficult for people who want to engage with them. Intuitive and user-friendly web pages in themselves can foster civic engagement, spare time, money and effort for journalists and researchers and make it possible for anyone to find the content they are interested in. We conclude it is not enough that things are technically made accessible by assemblies if no reasonable person would ever be able to keep up with where to look for things and what is available, these systems fail to serve their purpose.