Tech-Facilitated Parliamentary Monitoring: 8 Use Cases

• Legislative Work

Parliaments are central to democracy, tasked with legislating for the common good and holding the executive branch accountable. In this context, citizen-led parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) play a vital role in assessing performance and strengthening accountability.

Monitoring parliaments is complex, but PMOs’ observations are essential to ensure transparency, foster citizen participation, and support democratic decision-making.

To achieve this, PMOs increasingly rely on technology. While some were already using e-democracy tools as early as 2011, today they face a rapidly evolving tech landscape—alongside challenges such as shrinking civic space, political polarization, and funding shortfalls.

In this environment, leveraging technology has become urgent, offering PMOs new ways to collect, analyze, and share information more efficiently and at scale.

This guide, published by NDI and Directorio Legislativo, assists PMOs to navigate the current landscape by leveraging technologies to more effectively support their work. Rooted in the real-life experiences of 12 PMOs from Asia, Latin America and Europe, this guide presents eight use cases, leveraging 20 tech tools, that may be adapted and tailored across contexts over time. 

Each use case includes multiple comparative country examples, descriptions of the technology type(s) in use, and describes the opportunities and challenges for each approach. Specific use cases include:

• Use Case 1: Legislator directory and activity monitoring
• Use Case 2: Public engagement with MPs
• Use Case 3: Legislative tracking
• Use Case 4: Discourse quality monitoring
• Use case 5: Budget and public finance tracking
• Use case 6: MP asset and conflict-of-interest monitoring
• USe case 7: Issue-based legislative monitoring; and
• Use case 8: AI transcription and interpretation.