In the evolution of the democratic process, the use of a scorecard and related measurement methodologies has proven very helpful. For example, scorecards are now regularly used to assess whether an election has been fully ‘free and fair’. In the case of election evaluation, indexing, or ‘score carding,’ has proven to be valuable in measuring performance within and across countries. Other democratic process indices widely recognized and accepted as methods of evaluating governance include the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index and the Freedom House Freedom in the World index. These indices have proven invaluable in evaluating progress within countries over time as well as cross-nationally. Using data from these indices has allowed governments to demonstrate progress in governance in a simple and concrete manner, democracy practitioners to zero in on particular areas of need, civil society to bring credibility to governance issues, and academic research to undertake regression analysis with a trusted and relatively unbiased aggregated evaluation.

Several attempts have been made to create a similar scorecard – and a related evaluation process – to measure the performance of a parliament. There has been hope for a single set of universally agreed principles or axioms on measuring parliamentary performance. If universality is not possible, then a parliamentary scorecard might still prove useful in measuring intra-country parliamentary performance across time although less useful in comparing performance across countries.

One reason for this potential difference is that the two basic parliamentary models – i.e. the Republican or Presidential and Westminster or Prime Ministerial models – give different powers and responsibilities to Congressmen or MPs respectively. The variations across the models as they have developed in practice mean that no two parliaments are exactly alike in practice. As a result, no set of indicators has proven to be universally applicable. In some cases, quantitative indicators have been regarded as the most relevant, while in other cases qualitative indicators have proven more interesting.

This study seeks to establish the state of parliamentary scorecard development, challenges to its future development, and possible routes forward to develop a universal parliamentary evaluation framework using a scorecard methodology that will assist African parliaments, civil society, donors, scholars, and other stakeholders in their work.

The purpose of this study is to review the place of scorecards in the measurement of parliamentary performance, with particular interest in the prospects for using scorecards with African parliaments. This is not a merely theoretical curiosity; effective capacity enhancing projects and programs begin with an assessment of existing capacity and a definition of needs. In the case of parliaments, that has always proven to be a complex and difficult task. Developing a widely accepted parliamentary scorecard would simplify the task of identifying capacity gaps as well as facilitating dialogue among more diverse groups of parliamentary stakeholders.