Home Page - Openpolis

Home Page - Openpolis: "Questo sito serve per organizzare i contributi comunitari alla progettazione e realizzazione dei sistemi." An absolutely excellent site which aims to do for Italian politics what Public Whip or TheyWorkForYou did for UK politics. Unfortunately, they're limited by the availability of data on the Camera and Senate websites, which hold information on the first to fourth legislatures, and the last three, but not the intervening legislatures, and which don't hold information on the conflict of interest forms filled out by legislators. Still, they hope to press newly elected President of the Chamber Bertinotti to do something about that.

I've created two SPSS files from the raw data provided by openpolis - one file for Deputies (not including the deputies of the fifteenth legislature) and one file for Senators (bang up to date).

The files are not ideal, because the one entry per deputy/senator format means that changes in parliamentary group, or multiple dates of election, are not permitted - but it's a good start, improving, at least in terms of coverage, over the publicly available Verzichelli-Cotta database.