Sites like TheyWorkForYou have led to a greater use of parliamentary voting records as a means of holding MPs to account, but it can also lead to misunderstandings about the position taken by the person voting, and to those absent due to maternity or illness being branded lazy. Ben Worthy and Cat Morgan discuss how their research has highlighted some of the problems and benefits of this additional data being made more readily available.

Watching Westminster has got a great deal easier. Since 2005, a whole array of new formal and informal disclosure tools mean we can watch, analyse and verify what MPs and peers are doing much more easily, often at the push of a button. Our Leverhulme project looks across this shifting landscape of searchable digital platforms of MPs’ expenses data, register of interests declarations, and Freedom of Information  requests.  

Most famously, at the centre of these transparency ecosystems stands TheyWorkForYou (TWFY), which monitors MPs’ voting and other activities. Created by volunteers in 2004 and run by mySociety since 2005, it allows us to see individual MPs’ (and peers’) voting records far more easily than in the past. For each MP it offers up, as the website describes, ‘a summary of their stances on important policy areas such as combating climate change or reforming the NHS’, described with phrases such as ‘generally voted for’, ‘always voted against’, and ‘never voted for’. Elsewhere it lists their full record, appearances, and declarations on the register of interests. It averages around 200,000 to 300,000 monthly visits, though this jumps amid elections or scandals.

And some MPs are not happy. A tweet by John Ashmore summarised, perhaps rather too pithily, the two reasons for their unhappiness or concern:

The first worry is that the voting data offers a distorted view. It doesn’t discriminate, for example, between certain types of votes and over-simplifies the rather complex realities. This means, as Stephen Bush recently explained, Green MP Caroline Lucas appears to have ‘voted a mixture of for and against greater regulation of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to extract shale gas’ because she opposed, and voted against, legislation she considered too weak. Some of the most controversial votes, such as the Free School Meals vote, only make sense in the light of the fact it was an Opposition Day vote, something the site doesn’t explain either. Our research has shown how the data is biased and unevenly focused on, for example, high profile or controversial MPs or particular votes. Aggregated data easily becomes a metric to measure, compare and create yardsticks for what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘bad‘ MP, giving the illusion of objectivity and measurability.