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The past decade has brought a boom of online initiatives that monitor the performance of parliaments - a practice commonly referred to as 'parliamentary informatics'. A recent survey identified 191 organisations monitoring over 80 parliaments worldwide; many of these use digital tools to aggregate information and facilitate citizens' involvement in parliamentary activity (Mandelbaum 2011). At the same time, little is actually known about who uses these platforms and whether they increase the quality of democracy. This paper aims to fill this gap by assessing parliamentary informatics projects in three European countries from the point of view of key democratic dimensions: equality, accountability, and political responsiveness. In particular, the paper shows that parliamentary informatics projects achieve mixed results in terms of democratic quality. Many of the traditionally underrepresented groups in politics have even more limited presence on these online platforms. Accountability - including access to user-friendly, close to real-time, and objective political information that help ordinary citizens to hold their representative accountable - turns out to be the strong point of this type of project. However, users do not consider transparency of information to be enough. Many participants build up significant expectations about the political effects of their engagement. Yet, their expectations are generally disappointed by lack of impact.

Parliamentary Informatics Projects – Who Are their Users and What Is Their Impact?