open-staten-generaal

open-staten-generaal facilitates large-scale access to data and statistics on political decision-making in The Netherlands, including:

all motions and legislation voted on in the House of Representatives (Dutch: Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal) and the Senate (Dutch: Eerste Kamer der Staten-Generaal).
all political parties and their members
historical and recent votes by all parties and individual politicians (if applicable) in both houses

Support for senate votes has not yet been implemented.

Current Datasets

The following databases are available as SQLite databases:

All politicians in the house of representatives, and their (possibly changing) party membership [link]
Votes by parties and politians in the house of representatives: [link]

Analysis

See Development Roadmap, Analysis

The following distance matrix is just one of the ways in which the dataset can be used to analyse Dutch politics. It roughly represents the voting similarity of Dutch parties in the House of Representatives. 0 distance implies they votes exactly the same on every issue.

	pvdd	vvd	cda	pvv	sgp	sp	brinkman	d66	grkh	pvda	verdonk	bontes	50plus	gl	cu
pvdd	0.000	1.313	1.099	1.236	1.024	0.280	1.370	0.594	2.000	0.671	1.057	1.198	0.532	0.287	0.719
vvd	1.313	0.000	0.489	0.675	0.588	1.293	0.284	0.906	1.000	0.863	0.497	0.952	1.023	1.229	0.914
cda	1.099	0.489	0.000	0.783	0.382	1.088	0.555	0.777	0.000	0.712	0.759	1.030	0.740	1.020	0.568
pvv	1.236	0.675	0.783	0.000	0.813	1.151	0.521	1.149	0.667	1.143	0.554	0.010	1.108	1.263	1.097
sgp	1.024	0.588	0.382	0.813	0.000	1.013	0.609	0.776	0.000	0.715	0.711	0.968	0.763	0.963	0.503
sp	0.280	1.293	1.088	1.151	1.013	0.000	1.317	0.694	2.000	0.720	1.004	1.111	0.565	0.408	0.739
brinkman	1.370	0.284	0.555	0.521	0.609	1.317	0.000	1.048	0.000	1.317	-1.000	-1.000	-1.000	1.356	1.030
d66	0.594	0.906	0.777	1.149	0.776	0.694	1.048	0.000	1.333	0.544	0.913	1.179	0.592	0.449	0.610
grkh	2.000	1.000	0.000	0.667	0.000	2.000	0.000	1.333	0.000	1.000	-1.000	-1.000	-1.000	2.000	1.333
pvda	0.671	0.863	0.712	1.143	0.715	0.720	1.317	0.544	1.000	0.000	0.863	1.052	0.804	0.585	0.518
verdonk	1.057	0.497	0.759	0.554	0.711	1.004	-1.000	0.913	-1.000	0.863	0.000	-1.000	-1.000	1.022	0.872
bontes	1.198	0.952	1.030	0.010	0.968	1.111	-1.000	1.179	-1.000	1.052	-1.000	0.000	1.144	1.286	1.198
50plus	0.532	1.023	0.740	1.108	0.763	0.565	-1.000	0.592	-1.000	0.804	-1.000	1.144	0.000	0.503	0.599
gl	0.287	1.229	1.020	1.263	0.963	0.408	1.356	0.449	2.000	0.585	1.022	1.286	0.503	0.000	0.654
cu	0.719	0.914	0.568	1.097	0.503	0.739	1.030	0.610	1.333	0.518	0.872	1.198	0.599	0.654	0.000

*Note: Negative values should be disregarded; they signal the occurrence of an unexpected vote (no 'yea','nay' or 'novote' votes occurred). This will be fixed soon.

Development Roadmap

Data

Data on the voting record of members of and parties in the Senate.
API access to all data
Frequent updates of the database

Analysis

Changes in party alignments and blocks over time
Identification of controversial issues
Comparison of party voting records with poll results among Dutch voters

Data Sources

Current (or future) datasources include:

The database of members of the House of Representatives is derived from the list maintained at parlement.nl [1] [2]
The voting record of members of and parties in the House of Representatives from 2009 onwards is crawled from the webinterface at tweedekamer.nl [1].
The voting record of members of and parties in the House of Representatives from approximately 1980 to 2013 will be supplied by the information services department of the Dutch House of Representatives [1]
Data on the presence of politicians at plenary meetings of the House of Representatives can be found in the minutes of each meeting, which are available here [1] for this and last year's meetings, and here [2] for meetings older than about 4 months