European Parliament | europaeum

Today I stumbled upon a somewhat interesting database tool in twitter that gathers all voting behavior of the Members of the European Parliament since May 8, 2008. It’s called EP Vote and lets you discover all votes according to the country, political groups and MEPs themselves. So far, 944 MEPs, 700 texts voted and 423,059 votes have been inserted into the database. And EP Vote doesn’t leave you along with this huge amount of numbers. One of the most interesting charts is a list of MEPs that haven’t been that diverse in their voting performance. Let’s take for instance the one they call whistleblower, Mr. Paul van Buitenen (Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance) who, if you believe the data, abstained in 98 % of the votes. The only times he could decide to vote in favour or against something was in some few matters of budgetary control. ;)

Link: www.epvote.eu

During this year’s annual international Paris seminar of les Jeunes Européens we came up with the idea of copying a quite successful video made by Hollywood’s favorite celebs to mobilize young voters in the 2008 United States presidential election. Thanks to the French Foundation of Political Innovation we could actually adapt the idea to the elections of the European Parliament (June 4 -7). Now I understand that it isn’t exactly as appealing as the originial as we are no actors of any kind, also there are some minor mistakes and it’s a bit too long … but still: I really like the result and I hope you enjoy it as well!

Update (13 May 2009): We just created a shorter version, and also subtitled versions for different languages will arrive shortly.

Update (28 May 2009): The subtitles have arrived. Find here the links to the various versions.

europaeum

one of the many euroblogs listed on bloggingportal.eu

Tag Archives: European Parliament

Tracking your MEP’s voting behavior

Don’t vote .. unless you care, of course! [update]