The Responsiveness of German MPs to Online Transparency Demands

The proposed paper will assess drivers of MP responsiveness to citizen’s transparency demands. Research focusing on parliaments in established democracies has clearly shown that individual parliamentary behaviour has become ever more responsive to citizen demands during the last decades and that the expansion of new information technologies has given a further boost to this development. Nevertheless, credibility and trust in institutions of representative democracy still continue to decline. Following upon this line of research, this paper will analyse factors that determine individual MPs responsiveness in the Bundestag’s 17. legislative period by using data provided by abgeordnetenwatch.de as well as individual attributes of German legislators.