You can now use The Public Whip to track the voting record of MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament) on the issues that you care about.  If you’re interested in this, please help out by creating “policies” on the site that represent how an imaginary “single issue MSP” would vote.  This will enable us to add a summary of each MSP’s voting record to their page on TheyWorkForYou.

The broader point I’m making is that it’s easy for anyone to contribute to projects like TheyWorkForYou and PublicWhip – you can help to make the proceedings of parliament more transparent and accessible.

Here are some possibly interesting facts that came out of this work, subject to the usual proviso that since we’re working from web-scraped data, there may well be errors in these (and bear in mind the caveat about how a “rebellion” is defined on Public Whip):

• The ranking of current MSPs from most to least rebellious has the Liberal Democrat Jamie Stone MSP at the top, going against the majority vote of the Liberal Democrats in 2.5% of divisions. Update: of course, this is dynamic data and so this result is now out of date – please follow the link to find the current list of “Most Rebellious MSPs”
• In the last couple of years, the most rebellious MSPs seem to vote with their party much more than the most rebellious MPs do.
• The voting record of the only independent MSP at the moment, Margo MacDonald MSP, has a very low similarity to any other MSP (about 50% at most), where as members affiliated with a party typically have at least a 90% agreement with some other MSP of the same party.
• There is only one spoiled vote recorded in the Official Report as far as I can tell, which was Nora Radcliffe MSP in this division.  It seems as if a spoiled vote is recorded if an MSP votes more than once when voting for particular candidates for a post.

Please let the Public Whip team know if you spot any errors, or are interested in doing some more complex analysis of voting records than the “policies” system seems to allow.

Background

A couple of years ago, as a Christmas holiday project that got rather out-of-hand, I did some volunteer work on adding data from the Scottish Parliament to the mySociety website They Work For You.  In case you’re not familiar with TheyWorkForYou, it takes the official records of parliament and presents them in a more accessible and compelling way – just compare side-by-side the presentation of the same debate in TheyWorkForYou and the Official Reports, for example:

Hopefully you’ll agree that the latter presentation is much more involving to read.

TheyWorkForYou also offers to email you an alert when your MP or MSP speaks in parliament or tables a question. These are just a couple of the services that are only possible as a result of programmers having scraped the reports published by the parliaments into a logically structured data format.

Doing this scraping and parsing is deeply irritating, and it’s one of those strange tasks where your ultimate aim is to provoke someone else into making all that tedious work redundant – all the UK parliaments should publish proceedings in a structured data format rather than horribly mangled HTML, and if they ever do, I’ll certainly be cheering.  However, until that day, we still want to be able to build tools that make the workings of parliament more accessible, and to do that at the moment means webscraping…

Anyway, one of the most popular features of They​​Work​​For​​You is that there is a summary of the voting record of each MP on their page – for example, have a look at the bottom of Gordon Brown’s page to see how he votes.  These data are actually calculated by a distinct project called The Public Whip (a creation of Julian Todd and Francis Irving) which uses the same structured version of data from parliament to track how MPs and Lords vote on particular issues.  This site provides an incredibly valuable service in that it gives you, for example, a simple way to check whether what your MP says in the next election campaign actually corresponds with their voting record. In order to produce those summaries of voting records on a particular issue, Francis and Julian developed the idea of letting users create “policies” each of which is like a “dream MP” for a particular point of view – they only vote in divisions relevant to one position they care about (e.g. “for replacing Trident”, “against up-front tuition fees”) and then vote in the way that’s best aligned with that principle. It’s not necessarily easy to create these policies, since you need to do some research into what were the important and relevant votes, but for anyone interested in how politics works, it’s a great exercise.

Adding Scottish Parliament Divisions

Unfortunately, when doing my original work on TheyWorkForYou Scotland, I didn’t have time to finish adding support for the Scottish Parliament to Public Whip as well, although I had parsed all the divisions of the parliament that appear in the Official Reports.

Recently I was provoked into picking this up again, and with the help of Francis Irving we’ve now got basic support for the Scottish Parliament up on Public Whip.  While the implementation of this was not, on the whole, very interesting, there are few points that are perhaps worth mentioning:

• Making changes of this kind is essentially an exercise in checking which assumptions made in the original version of the site need to be revised.  For example, as soon as you introduce the data from the Scottish Parliament the following assumptions are broken:
  • The name of a constituency and a date no longer determine a particular representative, since there are multiple regional MSPs for the same named constituency.
  • Constituency names are not unique to particular parliaments – some of the constituencies in the Scottish Parliament have the same names as those in the House of Commons.
  • What constitutes a rebellion isn’t necessarily the same.  In the House of Commons the closest thing to an explicit abstention is to vote both Aye and No in a division (marked as “Both” in Public Whip), whereas when voting in the Scottish Parliament there is an explicit option to abstain.  Since it seems that parties in the Scottish Parliament do whip their members to abstain in particular votes, I have counted as a rebellion any difference between the vote of the majority of the party and an individual, including abstentions.

You have to be careful about other assumptions that might seem obvious – for example, as of the time of writing, Alex Salmond is still both an MP and an MSP at the same time.  There are not only examples of people who have been both MPs and MSPs, but cases like Lord Steel of Aikwood who has been a MP, MSP and Lord.  (Historically, it gets even more awkward – Francis came across the case of the two Rowland Blennerhassetts who were the two MPs for Kerry in 1880 – constituencies in those days could have two members.)

Creating Policies

To make the information in Public Whip easily understandable by people, we really need volunteers to help create policies.  Depending on the complexity of the issue, and your level of interest in the Scottish Parliament this might be easy or difficult.  However, for anyone interested in Scottish politics, I think this should something worthwhile doing. For example, there have been a lot of votes on the issue of tuition fees and the graduate endowment fee, but you need to read quite a lot of the proceedings of the parliament in order to find out which were the really substantive votes and which were the peripheral ones.  In addition, phrasing the policy is a little tricky – just reusing one of those designed for the Westminster doesn’t really work, since the clearest point of view that seems to be at issue is whether higher education should be free for students from Scotland, not students in general.

[Update: I've removed a pointless section about version control software from the end of this post.]