Which Lobby Won the Vote ?

Our paper entitled " Which Lobby Won the Vote ? Visualizing Influence of Interest Groups in Swiss Parliament" was accepted for publication.

Members of national parliaments (MPs) often have ties to interest groups, or `lobbies', which might try to influence policies. In order to quantify the influence of lobbies on parliamentary decisions, we design an online platform that allows users to explore votes results, focusing on how interest groups members voted, in order to identify which lobbies voted for or against a given measure and in which proportion. We apply this approach to the specific case of the Swiss Federal Parliament. To achieve this, we build a database that combines two sources of openly available data: a register of politicians' interest ties, maintained by Lobbywatch.ch, an association dedicated to the monitoring of Swiss politicians' interest ties and the individual votes results in the Swiss Federal Parliament. A qualitative evaluation of the prototype was conducted with 7 domain experts (5 journalists and 2 politicians). They were all able to complete successfully the submitted tasks. Moreover, most of them reported that such a platform has the potential to increase the accountability of politicians towards the people and consequentially to raise the trust of the population in their elected representatives.

More information about MPs' ties : https://lobbywatch.ch/fr

Source : http://publications.hevs.ch/index.php/publications/show/2561