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Measuring Legislative Oversight

Measuring Legislative Oversight. Jonathan Bright j onathan.bright@eui.eu. The potential of parliamentary informatics. ‘Open’ data sources present a huge opportunity for political science

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Measuring Legislative Oversight

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  1. Measuring Legislative Oversight Jonathan Bright jonathan.bright@eui.eu

  2. The potential of parliamentary informatics • ‘Open’ data sources present a huge opportunity for political science • Can measure the previously unmeasurable and hence put existing theories about the functioning of parliaments to the test

  3. Measuring Oversight • This project is about measuring one such concept: ‘oversight’ • Crucial function of modern parliaments • Defined here as the scrutiny of individual pieces of legislation as they move through the legislative process

  4. Previous measures • Single case studies or reviews of small amounts of legislation • Can’t speak to general trends • Very general measures based on for example the overall time to legislation • Little attention to the nuance of the parliamentary process

  5. Measuring Oversight • Four measures: • Speed of the process both overall and its individual stages • Committee debates • Substantive changes made to legislation • Roll call votes • Question: do bills relating to crime and security receive less scrutiny than other pieces of legislation? • Data based on the UK parliament, 1997-2012 • Extracted from: • www.parliament.uk • www.legislation.gov.uk • www.publicwhip.org.uk

  6. Speed • Average crime and security bill has become law before the average normal bill has passed through its second reading

  7. Committees • Average crime and security bill has more committee sittings • …and these sittings generally last for longer

  8. Amendments • No statistical difference between amount of amendments • (python’s difflib used for calculation)

  9. Vote • Largest cluster of crime and security votes in the bottom right hand corner

  10. Conclusions • Crime and security bills have an expedited legislative process • But more legislative activity is packed into this time • A plea to those «opening parliament» – don’t forget about academics! • Bulk download options for data as well as APIs • Standard / easily decodable formats: XML and JSON as well as HTML and PDFs • Sunlight foundation / Theywork for you great examples of this

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