Tracking a parliamentary session through public data

A parliamentary session leaves behind a quantity of documents: agendas, proceedings, voting records, committee reports. Taken one at a time, each says little. Set in series across a full session, they describe what a chamber actually did.

The first indicator is the ratio of bills tabled to bills passed. A wide gap does not mean an idle chamber: it often points to a crowded agenda, or to texts tabled to stake out a position with no intention of carrying them to a vote.

The second is where texts come from. A law may originate with the government or with a member. The respective share of the two measures the chamber’s real capacity for initiative against the executive.

The third is scrutiny: written and oral questions, summonses, committees of inquiry. It is parliament’s least spectacular function and its most directly useful to citizens, since it obliges the administration to account for itself in writing.

LECAP DATA will publish these series as session documents become available, with a source for every data point. A figure without a source is not data: it is an assertion with numbers around it.