Measuring Parliaments: Construction of Indicators of Legislative Oversight

Governmental accountability is an obligation that different levels of government must fulfil nowadays. In order to accomplish this, different levels of government and different powers, not only the Executive, must disclosure information regarding the use of public resources and the goods and services delivered to the people. Although there are several goods that can be easily measured, others cannot. Those provided by the Parliaments lies in that last category. The results delivered by the legislative branch are highly abstract. Brazil ́s House of Representatives represents the people (representation function), legislates on matters of national interest (legislation function) and audits the use of public resources (oversight function). The studies analysing principal-agent theory on legislative oversight and the use of fire alarms and policy patrol were not able to identify these indicators so far. This study aims to construct objective indicators of legislative performance, when exercising their oversight function. The research is empirical, and was divided in two phases. Initially, to elucidate the main indicators of oversight function performance, interviews were conducted with key bureaucrats from the Brazilian and European Parliaments. In addition, data was gathered in order to measure these indicators and to test their validity. The study is a first step towards a model to measure Parliamentarian performance and their effectiveness. Through their results aspects to evaluate oversight function are proposed and must be depeened in the future in order to allow works on comparative research on Parliamentarian performance.