IPU Parline
A brief intro to legislatures
IPU Parline’s dataset contains information on different legislative bodies in countries, depending on what system they have. Here is a summary of what countries have what type of system.
Bicameral legislatures
Bicameral legislatures have two different legislative bodies, typically an upper chamber and a lower chamber. For example, Brazil has a Federal Senate (upper) and Chamber of Deputies (lower).
Unicameral legislatures
Unicameral legislatures only have one legislative body. For example, Finland has a parliament, so only one legislative body.
Comparing unicameral and bicameral legislatures?
Because of this difference in structure, to make worldwide comparisons and analyses, IPU uses data from lower chambers in bicameral legislatures to compare with unicameral legislatures. For global visualizations, they will use this for maps, etc.
Explaining the data structure
If you download the historical dataset from IPU, you have the following structure:
| ISO Code | Country | Chamber | Status | Percentage of women | Year | date_from | date_to | Notes | Structure | Chamber type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AF | Afghanistan | House of the People | Suspended | 1.9 | 1965-07-01 | 1969-08-31 | Bicameral | Lower chamber | ||
| AF | Afghanistan | House of the People | Suspended | 0.0 | 1969-09-01 | 1987-12-31 | Bicameral | Lower chamber | ||
| AF | Afghanistan | House of the People | Suspended | 3.0 | 1988-01-01 | 2005-08-31 | Bicameral | Lower chamber | ||
| AF | Afghanistan | House of the People | Suspended | 27.3 | 2005-09-01 | 2006-12-31 | Bicameral | Lower chamber | ||
| AF | Afghanistan | House of the People | Suspended | 27.7 | 2007-01-01 | 2007-12-31 | Bicameral | Lower chamber | ||
| AF | Afghanistan | House of the People | Suspended | 27.3 | 2008-01-01 | 2010-08-31 | Bicameral | Lower chamber |
The first and second columns identify the country and its ISO alpha-2 code. These are helpful for joining with region mappings to summarize by region and geojson files for maps.
The Chamber column names the particular chamber of the legislature. If you look to the Structure and Chamber type columns, you’ll see whether this is a single house (unicameral under Structure), or a lower or upper house (Chamber type). Status might have the value “Suspended” (like Afghanistan shown here), which means that the legislature is under “Suspended status, following an unconstitutional dissolution of parliament.”
The Year column is not to be used, since it is empty. Instead, I rely on the date_from and date_to columns to understand the data. The date_from column marks the beginning of that particular legislature, and the date_to marks the end (or a “-” denotes that it is the current legislature).
Visualizing this data for users
Good options for visualizing this dataset include maps (as shown above), time series line charts and area charts, and bar charts to compare regions in a particular year, for example.
Here is an example (and the data pulled from the IPU API) of a time series by region:
Here is an example of a bar chart with regional averages:
You could also show the most recent top 10 countries with highest % of women, which I just got from the monthly rankings page (https://data.ipu.org/women-ranking/):
