When I posted about the MP’s analysis conducted in 2009 by KohoVolit.eu, I promised more information about their Index and data collection. Michal Skop is the person responsible for this part of the project. First of all I have asked him about the methodology of the KohoVolit Index itself:
“It is changing – because we constantly improve it. The last year it was (a bit simplified): average of the numbers of MPs that were less active than the MP (in one of the measured things – interpellations, speeches, votes (presence), proposals). For example: MP X voted always and therefore s/he was better than all the other 199 MPs (who missed some). We add 199. The MP X has not proposed anything, had no interpellation and did not speak, but all the others have done it. So we count 3 times (interpellations, proposals, speeches) 0 (=no MP was worse than this X). We make average: (199+0+0+0)/4 = 49.25 (It was a bit more complicated, but generally we did it this way.)
I plan to change it for this end of the year and put more weight into “presence (to vote)”.
When asked about the data collection process, Michal responded:
“I use the scrapers I have done. So for “presence” I have all the divisions downloaded and processed, so I just run the query to count it. For the rest, there are a particular pages for each MP at the official website (like this one here, which is a list “reporter of proposals”) and we scrape them and just count it all.”
The new analysis is up from what I can see, so we should be able to provide you with more insights into this year’s methodology fairly soon.