The Effect of MP Monitoring Websites on Parliamentary Behaviour

The increasing amount of websites monitoring MPs’ behaviour has led to controversies about their potential impact on MPs‘ parliamentary work. It has been claimed among others that monitoring organisations might incentivise MPs to prioritise quantitative aspects of their parliamentary work to achieve good scores eventually helping to support their re-election objective not necessarily resulting in a higher quality of parliamentary work (Edwards et al., 2015). While this seems more likely for monitoring websites that simply summarise the quantity of each MPs’ usage of formal parliamentary activities (e.g. private member bills, oral/written parliamentary questions), it might be less the case for evaluations that focus on MPs’ parliamentary work in a more comprehensive way (e.g. expert judgements). Given the usual lack of transparency of such comprehensive evaluations of MPs this article aims at examining the implicitly (or explicitly but not communicated) underlying evaluation criteria. Furthermore, we compare the impact of two kinds of MP monitoring websites. More precisely, we test whether MPs expecting to be monitored with a focus on purely quantitative aspects of parliamentary work do indeed adjust their parliamentary behaviour to focus more strongly on quantitative aspects of their parliamentary work than MPs expecting to be evaluated not purely based on quantitative aspects. In a first step, we examine whether more comprehensive evaluations of MPs’ parliamentary work are successful in avoiding to privilege quantitative aspects of parliamentary work. We theoretically derive potential evaluation criteria for MP evaluations and subsequently test them empirically. We therefore include factor scores based on the combination of a wide range of parliamentary activity data and unique data on aspects of quality and effectiveness of parliamentary work derived from a peer assessment survey among Belgian MPs in a multilevel analysis. Our dependent variable is composed of MP evaluations of Flemish-speaking Belgian MPs preceding the 2019 general election by one of Belgium’s most influential newspapers claiming to rely on document analyses and interviews with parliamentary party group leaders. In a second step, we turn towards the potential impact of different kinds of MP evaluations on MPs’ parliamentary behaviour. We test whether the prevalence of MP evaluations relying entirely on quantitative aspects leads MPs to privilege quantitative aspects of their parliamentary work as compared to MPs that expect a more comprehensive evaluation of their parliamentary work. We therefore make use of the particular feature of Belgium with MPs from the Federal Parliament acting in de facto divided media landscapes going along with a prevalence of purely quantitative (French-speaking) vs. comprehensive evaluations (Dutch-speaking) of MPs’ parliamentary work. While previous research for an earlier period found a structurally lower activity of French-speaking Belgian Federal MPs (Dandoy, 2011), we expect Belgian Federal MPs from French-speaking constituencies to focus now more on parliamentary activity than MPs from mixed or Dutch-speaking constituencies. We use logarithmic/negative binomial regression models to analyse differences in general parliamentary activity as well as specific types of parliamentary activity among Belgian MPs with differing incentive structures provided by parliamentary monitoring websites/media evaluations controlling for potentially confounding factors.