Parliamentary Performance

The Parliamentary Centre in cooperation with the World Bank Institute is developing tools to measure parliamentary performance. The objective is to provide parliamentarians, parliamentary staff and others who study parliament with practical means to evaluate parliamentary performance against general standards adapted to the circumstances of each country. We see the tools as being useful in preparing baseline studies, establishing benchmarks of progress and making comparisons between parliaments and of a given parliament over time.

The Parliamentary Report Card

The first step in the process was to develop a conceptual framework for parliamentary performance that we have expressed in the form of a parliamentary report card. We have deliberately kept the report card as simple as possible, although we acknowledge this may disappoint the methodologically inclined. We do not claim that the report card will yield statistically significant results but that was not our purpose. We want to supply a useful tool for busy practitioners to employ in planning and evaluating their work. In our experience, this means that the tool must be user friendly and inexpensive while serving the important purpose of critically examining performance.

Parliamentary Report Card

The report card tests parliamentary performance in four areas of activity that are almost universally regarded as being core lines of parliamentary service, namely:

• Legislation
• Budget
• Oversight and
• Representation

The report card evaluates these four lines of service against five performance tests, namely:

• level and range of activity
• openness and transparency
• participation
• accountability
• policy and program impact

The first and last of these tests represent the traditional concerns about how busy and how influential parliament is while the other three tests judge the contribution of parliament to core values of good governance.

• Performance Indicators and the Budget Process

Having established our general framework for measuring parliamentary performance - in the form of the scorecard - the next step was to develop specific performance indicators. We decided to take this step by first developing indicators for one of the core lines of parliamentary service. Taking into account the current programming interests of the Parliamentary Centre and the World Bank Institute, we chose parliament's role in the budget process as the place to start. Drawing on years of experience in Canada and countries in Asia, Africa and Eastern and Central Europe, we developed a set of indicators in the form of a questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of a total of 37 questions (indicators) broken down as follows:

• level and range of activity 7
• openness and transparency 9
• participation 7
• accountability 7
• policy and program impact 7

Field Testing the Report Card

We have begun field-testing the scorecard by administering it to parliamentarians and non-parliamentarians in a series of selected countries. The first test was recently carried out in Cambodia where 6 respondents - 3 members of the National Assembly, 2 Senators and one representative of Civil Society completed and returned the questionnaire. Raw responses ranked the indicator of parliamentary performance on a scale that ranged from "not present at all" to "strongly present" Analysis of the results has been prepared by Robert Miller, Executive Director of the Parliamentary Centre.

We would appreciate your comments on the above documents and specifically:

1. What do you think of the score itself?
2. What do you think of its use in the Cambodian case, including both results and analysis?

We welcome your comments and suggestions on the scorecard to which we will respond.

For further information please contact Robert Miller at miller@parl.gc.ca.