Cross-Organizational Analysis of Parliamentary Processes: A Case Study

TL;DR

This paper applies process mining to analyze and compare legislative processes across three German state parliaments, revealing differences and best practices, and bridging political science with process mining.

Contribution

It is the first study to use process mining on parliamentary processes, demonstrating cross-organizational analysis in a novel interdisciplinary context.

Findings

Identified differences in legislative processes across regions

Provided insights into best practices in parliamentary workflows

Established the feasibility of applying process mining to political institutions

Abstract

Process Mining has been widely adopted by businesses and has been shown to help organizations analyze and optimize their processes. However, so far, little attention has gone into the cross-organizational comparison of processes, since many companies are hesitant to share their data. In this paper, we explore the processes of German state parliaments that are often legally required to share their data and run the same type of processes for different geographical regions. This paper is the first attempt to apply process mining to parliamentary processes and, therefore, contributes toward a novel interdisciplinary research area that combines political science and process mining. In our case study, we analyze legislative processes of three German state parliaments and generate insights into their differences and best practices. We provide a discussion of the relevance of our results that are based on knowledge exchange with a political scientist and a domain expert from the German federal parliament.