FAQ
The European Parliament is one of the three most important political institutions of the European Union, along with the European Commission and the Council of the European Union. The Parliament and the Council are co-legislators whose function is to amend the legislative propositions advanced by the Commission. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) also have the task of voting for and approving the Commission's president and commissioners.
At present, the European Parliament has 705 members, distributed among the 27 member countries in proportion to their population. Germany, France, Italy and Spain represent the four largest countries in the Union (with 96, 79, 76 and 56 MEPs respectively). Before the UK's definitive exit from the European Union in 2020, there were 751 members of parliament, 73 of whom represented the UK. Of these 73 seats, 27 were redistributed among the remaining states. In order to provide the most complete and accurate analysis of the legislative activity of the last legislature, our study also takes into account the votes of British MEPs.
Navigating this website, you will come across political groups, national delegations and political parties. The three terms are not to be confused: a party is a national political organization that coordinates candidates running for elections, while groups are the european political alliances that aggregate different national parties in the European Parliament and coordinate the activity of MEP to give consistency to their votes and to facilitate parliamentary negotiations. Delegations, on the other hand, refer to all the parties and parliamentarians in a given member state who belong to a given group. On the various pages of our website, you will find the scores obtained by the national delegations and the detail of the of political parties and MEPs who are members of them.
The total number of MEPs sitting in the European Parliament during the 2019-2024 term of office taken into account for this study is 853. This high number of MEPs compared with the 705 currently sitting in the parliament is explained by the departure of MEPs and their replacement by new MEPs during the legislature. Some MEPs arrived during the legislature to replace MEPs who had started a mandate in their own country or who had left Parliament following the Brexit. We chose to evaluate all MEPs, including those who left and those who arrived during the legislature and therefore didn't take part in all the votes, as long as they voted on at least one of the texts we selected for analysis.
It's not uncommon for MEPs to change political groups during their term of office. Of the 853 MEPs assessed, 67 changed groups during their term of office. When calculating the scores for national delegations and European political groups, we took into account the political affiliation of MEPs at the time of the vote, rather than their current political group. In this way, a delegation's (or group's) score can be calculated from the votes of MEPs who no longer belong to that delegation (or group).
It is due to the fact that not all MEPs cast the same number of votes. Therefore, the MEPs in a delegation (or group) do not all have the same weight in the calculation of the delegation's (or group's) score, as some have arrived or left during the legislature and have therefore not taken part in all the votes. In addition, we decided not to penalise the absences of deputies, which have note been taken into account in the calculation of their score. An MEP who is frequently absent or who has not been in office during the five years of the legislature will therefore have less weight in the score of its delegation (or group) than an MEP who is often present at plenary sessions. An MEP may have changed groups during his or her term of office. In this case, the delegation's (or group's) score is calculated on the basis of only part of the MEP's votes, corresponding to the votes cast when he or she was in that delegation (or group). Picture a fictitious case: a member of parliament has voted against every important text during his term of office, but suddenly changes group at the very end of his term. His personal score would be poor, but would not affect the rating of the group he has just joined. For the same reasons, a group's overall score does not correspond to the average score of the delegations that make up the group. Delegations have a different weighting according to the total number of votes associated with them, which depends on the number of deputies, their attendance rate at plenary sessions, the length of their term of office, and whether or not they change political groups during their term of office.
The 150 chosen amendments were classified into one of two groupings: those which “save” and those which “destroy” nature. This allowed us to score voting Members of the Parliament (MEPs) as follows: if an MEP voted in favor of an amendment "saving" nature or against an amendment "destroying" nature, they obtained one point. If an MEP voted against an amendment "saving" nature or in favour an amendment "destroying" nature, they lost one point. Abstentions were included in the scoring of the MEP, but they were counted as a zero. The total score attributed to each MEP allowed us to calculate a mark from 0 to 20 for the delegation and group they belonged to. For a detailed description of our methodology, please check the dedicated page that can be reached via the button in the website header.
Different MEPs belonging to the same national party may be attached to different European groups. For this reason, a national party may be represented on several delegations from the same Member State.
Having based the calculation of delegation and group scores on the voting activity of individual MEPs, we were also able to calculate the individual notes of all MEPs. These individual scores will be implemented on this site in the coming weeks. Stay tuned not to miss all the details of our analysis!