Using data for more transparency and democracy

Picture: NZZ, Goran Basic

An article by Alexandra Kohler in the NZZ of 7.9.2015:

What if only 25-year-olds went to the polls? At the weekend, researchers, programmers, journalists and statisticians got to the bottom of this and other questions at the «Election Hackdays».

Do politicians in Parliament really vote the way they promised before the elections? One group at the «Open Data Election Hackdays 2015» tried to find out. The result was a «KandiDaten» app, which is intended in future to compare the election promises and voting behaviour of candidates for the National Council and the Council of States. Readers, voters, people interested in politics and non-governmental organisations can scrutinise politicians, comment on them and point out consistent and inconsistent behaviour.

Keeping a close eye on politicians – this is just one of several projects that were created last Friday and Saturday in the halls of the NZZ and at the newspaper «Le Temps» in Lausanne. The idea of so-called hackdays is simple: programmers, researchers and interested people from various fields come together for a short time and develop innovative applications on a specific topic. In this case the topic was «the 2015 federal elections». All participants in the event were motivated to make political processes more transparent and to analyse voting and voter data as well as information on politicians and elections.

Disclosing relevant data

On Friday morning, some of the 40 participants presented a wide variety of datasets. These data come for the most part from public bodies such as municipal, cantonal and national statistical offices. But associations such as Lobbywatch and research centres such as FORS also make their data (partly) available to the public. The aim of opendata.ch is for all data that are relevant to the public to be made public. Hannes Gassert, vice president of Open Data, is therefore convinced that many things can emerge at hackdays that contribute to the formation of political opinion and to transparency. He encouraged the hackday participants to publish all their projects – even if they are not quite finished – and, if at all possible, to continue them.

Friday afternoon was then devoted entirely to brainstorming and «hacking», in other words programming. In between, there were exchanges via Skype with the parallel event in Lausanne, where hackdays were also taking place on the premises of the newspaper «Le Temps». In the evening, quite a few teams in both Zurich and Lausanne were busy until late. And on Saturday, too, the participants kept eagerly tinkering with their apps. The time pressure was great, because the creative minds were already presenting their results and their approaches in the afternoon. How can we measure the behaviour of parliamentarians on Twitter over time, and are there any anomalies? This question was answered by means of an analysis of Twitter data. Striking: after 9 February 2014, when the Swiss people accepted the mass immigration initiative, the parliamentarians’ Twitter traffic shot up.

Another application links various datasets from the website Parlament.ch on the National Council and the Council of States, on the committees and on the individual parliamentarians. The app «Committees in Parliament» makes it possible to show, for example, which committees CVP parliamentarians sit on. Another creative application was developed on the theme «What if?». What would Parliament look like if only people between 25 and 34 voted? Or only women between 75 and 85? Sympathy ratings for the parties and actual voting behaviour sometimes diverge widely.

Hackdays as a democratic element

Balthasar Glättli, National Councillor and leader of the Green parliamentary group in the Federal Palace, was enthusiastic about the event. On Saturday, Glättli paid the «hackers» at Falkenstrasse a visit and was quite amazed by the six final presentations. He particularly liked the parliamentarian fact check: «This project tries to get away from the spurious precision of election promises and really wants to check politicians against their promises and whether they keep them,» he says. Regularly scrutinising the actual actions of politicians is important, he says. For him, open data and hackdays, where people from a wide range of backgrounds work with these data and exchange ideas, are an important democratic element.

This is an article by Alexandra Kohler in the NZZ of 7.9.2015.