Openparlamento.it - the index of activity

In this second article about Openparlamento.it, we’ll introduce the index of activity, an index we created to measure and compare, from a strtictly quantitative point of view, the activities of the elected officials in the Parliament.

The index has been publicly discussed in one of the openpolis mailing lists for some time.
What follows is a summary of the criteria used to craft it and how it was used to generate a report on the activity in the Italian Parliament, presented to the press in June.

The index is built out of official parliamentary acts, published in the parliamentary web sites (https://www.senato.it and https://www.camera.it) and gathered on our servers. It is based on:

• the number of acts an official presents and wether as first signer, co-signer or simple supporter,
• the number of votings an official takes part to,
• the number of statements an official releases, during assembly or committee meetings.

As far as members of the government are concerned, only those acts presented as members of the parliament are taken into account. This means that the index of activity for these officials will be comparatively lower than that of other officials that do not have government charges.
Also, institutional charges, like the president or vice-president of Il Senato or La Camera and the leaders of parliamentary groups, do have other tasks and are able to take only limited part in the standard parliamentary activities.

The formula used to compute the parliamentary index takes into account these factors using the following table of weights.

The weights take into account the difference between presenting an act as first-signer, co-signing an act presented by someone else, and being a simple supporter of the act.
Also, different weights are given to different types of act, somehow following their political relevance. For example a question has weight lower than a motion, that has itself a lower weight than a law design, because the amount of effective and political work spent to prepare such different types of acts is comparatively different.
Of course, the quality of the work done varies widely for each single act in an unmeasurable way. Much of the activities depend on the content of the act itself rather than on its type and much of the political work an official performs is done out of the monitored meetings in assemblies or commissions that we’re able to consider for the computation.

That is the weakness of the methodology behind the construction of the index, that makes it suitable for a general, quantitative overview on the activities of the elected officials and can not, in any context, be regarded as a measure of the quality of the work.

On the 16th of June a report named “Camere aperte” (Open chambers) was presented to the press by the Civic Observatory on Italian Parliament.
The report contained different rankings of the parliament officials, ranging from the most (and least) present, to the most (and least) active, and it was based on data from the openparlamento.it web site.
It received a lot of attention from the italian press and spurred an array of angry reactions from those officials emerging in the “least” rankings, but it was also welcome by other officials and by institutions in general, and it will be presented again in few months.