Mr. Stefanos Loukopoulos (Director) | Interview given to Good Move Initiatives
Vouliwatch (“Vouli" means Parliament in Greek) is a non-partisan parliamentary monitoring/transparency promoting organisation that was set up and legally registered in Athens in March 2014 in response to the rising disillusionment of a large segment of the Greek population towards parliamentary democracy and the broader Greek political system.
The organisation’s main goal is to bridge the gap between citizens and their political representatives whilst promoting a culture of transparency, accountability and active citizenship. In doing so, Vouliwatch makes use of innovative digital technology applications whose purpose is to facilitate the monitoring of parliamentarian’s activities (including their financial interests), the transparent communication between MPs/MEPs and their constituents as well as the recording of all parliamentary activity (legislative process).
Vouliwatch is Greece’s first (and only) parliamentary watchdog organisation, which has since gone from strength to strength and is now a well-known institution in Greece’s civil society scene, with a solid history of victories for parliamentary transparency and open government.
Today we are talking to Vouliwatch’s Director, Stefanos Loukopoulos.
Vouliwatch publishes its annual report also in English language - see here
Stefanos, Vouliwatch is known as an online participatory platform where citizens can directly pose questions to parliamentary representatives, and receive answers in the public realm. What is the added value of an online platform like this vs. traditional private correspondence between citizens and their MPs?
One of our primary target audiences is the younger generations as we believe that educating the youth in the values of a truly open, participatory and transparent political system will benefit in the long run the quality of democracy in Greece. With this in mind, we thought that using digital technology would make this process more convenient and attractive to the younger generations and increase their interest in the commons. Through Vouliwatch anyone can monitor parliament, read bills and communicate with their MPs from the comfort of their home or while on the move via smart phones. I could not in fact imagine a twenty something year old today going through the effort of posting a letter, calling or sending an email to their MP. The way we’ve designed the platform greatly speeds up and facilitates this process. Using digital technology we are more likely to engage the youth, and it makes it easier for them to contribute and participate.
Moreover, the open, public nature of the dialogue adds incentive for the MP to respond to questions, and also adds pressure for them to act on issues where a lot of public interest is displayed. “Verba volent scripta manent”, or ‘spoken words fly away, written words remain,’ as they say.
Vouliwatch is the only Greek website where you can compare the income statements of Members of Parliament over time.
What were the main challenges you faced at Vouliwatch’s inception and how did you overcome them?
Greek political culture is largely defined by a lack of openness so Vouliwatch’s approach was seen as completely alien to the way politics is done in Greece. This meant that politicians were initially extremely hesitant to participate and engage with the platform. They could not perceive the added value that Vouliwatch brought and rather they saw it as a nuisance. Over time however, due to the growing popularity of Vouliwatch among citizens and mainstream media, as well as one to one meetings we conducted with MPs personally, trust was created and engagement with the platform began to grow.
A perhaps lesser known part of Vouliwatch’s work is your campaigning and advocacy work on transparency and open government issues. Can you tell us why this part of your work is so important and what you’d consider Vouliwatch’s greatest successes in this field over the years?
We noticed that in Greece there was a lack of civil society organisations doing advocacy and campaigning work for transparency and accountability issues, which was particularly important in the setting of the economic crisis, and in the context of political corruption and that is why we made a conscious decision to widen the scope of the organisation. In fact, transparency and accountability foster trust in the political system while providing citizens with all the necessary information for them to have an active role, and this constitutes a fundamental aspect of a healthy democracy.
Our first big successful campaign relates to the framework concerning the asset declarations of elected representatives. Prior to our campaign the asset declarations were published in scanned handwritten documents, which remained online for a mere thirty days. Thus, citizens were unable to monitor over time the financial situation of politicians. We campaigned for the declarations to remain public indeterminately and for the format to be machine readable. This resulted in an amendment of the legal framework and today they are published in machine readable format for a period of seven years, which is a great improvement.
An equally important victory for us was the case we brought to the Constitutional Court of Greece regarding the Auditing Parliamentary Committee and its unwillingness to publish the findings of its audits of the financials of political parties. The committee in question publishes annual reports with its main findings, and for three consecutive years in these reports it failed to name the political parties that it had found to be misusing funds, nor did they publish the amount of public funds that were mishandled. This was the first time that legal action had been taken against the Greek Parliament. Five days prior to the hearing date, the committee relented and provided us with the requested information. The biggest impact of this was the fact the following year the committee in question, when publishing its findings, did name the parties that had misused funds, as well as stating the amount of funds that were misused.
If however I had to single out an impactful action that we recently took, I would definitely pick our advocacy work which aimed at convincing the Greek Government to regulate lobbying. Vouliwatch has been advocating for a lobbying bill for the past 3 years and we not only managed to help get the process going, but we were also instrumental in the shaping of the bill that was recently voted in Parliament. In fact, following our intervention in Parliament - where we were invited by the relevant committee to present our positions - three of our main proposed amendments were included in the final bill. What is more our positions where fully adopted by the main opposition parties. If I am honest, I can’t say that I am fully pleased with the final result, as the bill provides a very narrow definition of lobbying which leaves out of its regulatory framework a great chunk of such activities, however it is a start. I believe that in the future, given the opposition parties’ full endorsement of our proposals, we will have the chance to further improve lobbying regulation in Greece.
Together with WWF Greece and several climate experts, Vouliwatch created a crowd-sourced climate law that aims to help Greece become climate neutral.
What is Vouliwatch working on at the moment and what is your vision for the future?
Among other things we are currently working on creating a web platform through which citizens, journalists as well as international institutions and organisations will be able to monitor Greece’s government’s adherence to the rule of law. In brief, the platform will record and categorise into issue areas specific instances on non-adherence to the rule of law which will be collected and analysed by our team of researchers. At the same time, we have recently embarked on a new project whose final output will be the development of a civic tech platform aiming at enhancing citizen’s participation and oversight at local government level.
What Vouliwatch hopes to achieve is a gradual paradigm shift in the way both politicians and citizens perceive politics and democracy in broader terms. We envisage a more transparent, inclusive and participatory political system with integrity and accountability at its core.
Now Vouliwatch is an independent civil society organisation, and as such doesn’t receive funding from any political parties or the state. What are your main challenges in securing funding?
Well, that is a good question. We can and do participate in a number of EU projects, which provide funding for organisations like ours, but unfortunately this is all project based, which means that it doesn’t help with funding for Vouliwatch’s core mission and work, nor for our operational expenses, though it does enable us to participate in a lot of worthy projects, and to cooperate with other organisations across Europe. Our only sources of operational funding are from small individual donations via our website and larger grants from charitable foundations such as the Guerrilla Foundation, so these two funding streams are what we literally rely on in order to continue our work as Vouliwatch. Unfortunately, local Greek foundations are often hesitant to fund organisations dealing with political issues, especially in the midst of the refugee crisis, not to mention the prolonged domestic economic crisis. There is also only a limited number of foreign foundations that deal with Greece, so these are our key challenges I would say.
Vouliwatch created a tool, which lets users compare the income statement between two politicians.
I hear you’re planning to extend the platform to local level politics within the next year. What can you tell me about this exciting new branch of Vouliwatch’s work?
Localwatch will focus on citizen participation on the municipal level. It will allow monitoring and Q & As like in Vouliwatch but will be designed specifically to stimulate citizen engagement through features such as participatory budgeting, tools facilitating the organisation of volunteering actions at local level and so on.
We will be starting to work on it this coming September and hope to have it up and running within two years.
How can readers of the Good Move Initiatives Blog contribute to your work? How can they support your cause?
In a time where democracy is under threat across the globe, independent watchdog organisations such as Vouliwatch can act as a line of defence for the public interest. It is therefore important now more than ever for such organisations to be strengthened both in terms of outreach and financial capacity.
Donations can be made to support our work here or should you like to discuss a funding opportunity through a foundation please get in touch directly via stefanos@vouliwatch.gr.
If you want to learn more about our work I highly recommend reading our latest annual report, which is available in English language here.