Identifying Transparency Assessment Criteria for Islamic Parliament of Iran

The Islamic Consultative Assembly is the main legislative, and policy-making body, and considered the most important body supervising laws in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Inefficiencies and the adoption of conflicting and inappropriate laws in the country's legislative system show that many factors involved in legislation remain hidden from the eyes of the public and experts. Creating transparency in the Islamic Consultative Assembly will increase people's control over the performance of their representatives, hold them accountable, reduce corruption, and consequently, increase the efficiency of the Islamic Consultative Assembly. Also, the lack of a comprehensive measure to assess the multidimensional transparency of Iran's Parliament has led to a narrow recognition of the issue. This study aims to identify the criteria for assessing the transparency of the Islamic Consultative Assembly. By reviewing global experiences and collecting the components of parliamentary transparency, a comprehensive framework was designed and provided to a focus group with twelve experts. For articulating the findings and completing the assessment framework, seven other experts were interviewed. After analyzing the interviews using content analysis methodology, the final framework for assessing the transparency of the Islamic Consultative Assembly with 12 dimensions and 108 components was obtained. Transparency in MP's performance, MP's conflicts of interest, committees, parliamentary groups, plenary sessions, bills, lobbying, parliamentary administration, parliamentary elections, parliamentary institutions, citizen participation, and quality of parliamentary data are the main dimensions of the final framework designed to assess the transparency of the parliament.