PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

■ collaborating with NGOs in local schemes;
■ where applicable, making recommendations to government ministries for
the allocation of budgets in their district.
In some African countries, parliamentarians are allocated a sum from the
central government development budget for local projects which they can
spend at their own discretion. In India, parliamentarians may suggest development
works to the sum of 20 million rupees annually to be carried out in their
constituency; and there is a special committee of both Houses which liaises
with the relevant ministry to assist members in the effective implementation
of this scheme.
A future-oriented problem:
email overload
An accessible parliament I 73
At the other end of the development scale is a problem increasingly being
experienced in countries with high Internet usage: that of email overload on
parliamentarians and their offices. This has been of particular concern to the
US Congress, and their report E-mail Overload in Congress (2002, available
from ) will be of more general interest.
Among problems it identifies are: huge spurts in email traffic when contentious
issues hit the public consciousness, but which do not then subside; a
large increase in traffic from correspondents outside a member’s district;
organisations which use email for indiscriminate lobbying or ‘astroturfing’;
expectations of immediate response since the means of communication is
instantaneous; limited office budgets for dealing with the load. The report
comments:
While all institutions are struggling to adapt to the demands of a
‘paperless environment’, the challenges facing Congress are among
the most difficult and contentious. Growing numbers of citizens are
frustrated by what they perceive to be Congress’ lack of responsiveness
to e-mail. At the same time, Congress is frustrated by what it perceives
to be e-citizens’ lack of understanding of how Congress works and the
constraints under which it must operate….Until now, rather than
enhancing democracy – as so many hoped – e-mail has heightened tensions
and public disgruntlement with Congress.
Among the recommendations made to congressional offices are to have a
clearly worked out strategy for dealing with email, including one of the latest
systems for sorting and storing it, and automating replies where appropriate.