Does accessibility of evaluative information facilitate better parliamentary oversight? Evidence from the Dutch parliament

Parliaments have a key role in holding governments accountable for an effective and efficient spending of public money. To fulfill this oversight function, evaluative information provided by ministerial departments can be very useful. Little empirical evidence exists thus far, however, on the determinants driving members of parliament (MPs) to ask questions about available evaluative information. In this paper, we analyze whether and on which conditions the ‘accessibility’ of evaluative information matters in incentivizing MPs to use evaluative knowledge in their daily parliamentary work. With MPs having different sources of information at their disposal other than evaluative evidence, and often having little time to scrutinize all supporting documents provided by the executive, one can expect that a greater accessibility of evaluative information will increase the chance that this information is actively referred to in parliamentary questions and debates. This paper investigates this expectation, by analyzing the results of a pilot that was recently (June 2020) launched by the Dutch Ministry of Finance. The pilot introduced a new format for ministries to provide evaluative information as required by the Government Accounts Act 2016. The overall premise underlying the pilot is precisely that accessible evaluative information facilitates more elaborate use of it. We investigate whether this assumption indeed holds true, and analyze various potential explanatory factors such as field characteristics, features of the proposal, or the political party where MPs belong to. We address this issue from a mixed method lens, and rely on an innovative combination of interviews with MPs, and automated text analysis of parliamentary documents (with or without pilot). Our analysis contributes to a better understanding of the role of evaluative information in fulfilling the parliamentary oversight function, and the politics of evidence informed policy making more in general.