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The Monkey Award

The Monkey Award is a single number, 0 to 100, published as a percentage of that award, that answers one question and only one:

How much did this specific person do to put those specific laws in place?

"This voting record was given a 72% Monkey Award." Higher is worse.

the MONKEY LIST      a curated set of enacted laws the movement has approved
  -> every ACT       each recorded thing this person did on each of those laws
    -> CLASSIFIED    into exactly one of twelve categories
      -> SCORED      each category carries a score 0-100 and a weight
        -> ONE NUMBER  the weighted average, published as a percentage of the award,
                       with a page you can reproduce using a calculator

It is an award, not a score​

Everything this product publishes about a politician is an award, or the absence of one. A person is either given an award, a percentage of one, or nothing. It is not a score, not a rating, not a grade, and not a verdict on them as a human being — and the language on every page holds that line.

A 0 does not mean good​

A 0% Monkey Award means: we assessed this record against the list and found nothing on it. It is the absence of a finding, not a compliment. Credit for doing the right thing is a different award entirely — the Llama — and conflating the two is the most common misreading available here.

The wall​

The Monkey Award is computed from the in-office voting record alone: votes, authorships, and instruments blocked from advancing. Interviews, transcripts, background research, resumes, education and qualification assessments never feed it. Those feed the Flamingo Award. The separation is absolute, and it is enforced in the build rather than remembered.

No curve, no cohort​

There is no bell curve, no banding, no floor, and no comparison against peers. Two people with identical records get identical awards whether they served together or fifty years apart. What the number measures is the record, not the neighbourhood.

Pages in this area​

  • The Monkey List — the curated set of enacted laws the award is computed over, and why it is deliberately short.
  • What counts as an act — the twelve categories every recorded act falls into, and why blocking a repair weighs thirty floor votes.
  • Do the math yourself — the equation is a weighted average, and every award shows its derivation term by term.

Where to go next​

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