A multidimensional ranking of Members of Parliament

Abstract

There has been a growing trend for public accountability of those who represent or act on behalf of the general public. Whilst politicians are forever appearing in the media to justify their actions, what has been lacking has been a broad objective measure of the amount of activity that they perform whilst in Parliament itself. We present a first attempt at a multi-dimensional scoring and ranking of British Members of Parliament. Three criteria are included in the score: the number of speeches made, the number of votes attended, and the number of written questions submitted. We use the resulting scores to place MPs into four quartiles and then show how the political parties are distributed amongst these four ‘divisions’. We also present the ‘Top 30 MPs’ according to our aggregate performance measure.