If you have ever wondered what your local MEP gets up to, if anything at all, in the European Parliament then a neat new website should help you get an idea of how much of a ‘presence’ your representative has in Brussels.
Set up by Flavien Deltort, former assistant to Italian radical MEP Marco Cappato, the website, Parlorama.com, gives you a quick and easy way of seeing how your MEP rates on plenary attendance, committee attendance and report-writing/question asking.
Arranged by country, it is easy to directly compare the performances among MEPs in one member state. The least active and most active of each country get highlighted in a thumbs-downy or starry way on the side of the page for extra and faster skewer potential.
Of course, I checked out my political fellow country men and women first and then the *Italians (always mentioned first in any tut-tut MEP-attendance sentence – yep, quite some thumbs-downing going on).
The aim of the exercise is to give each European citizen the possibility to judge the MEP they are considering voting for on the basis of their activity in parliament, says the website. I wonder how many complaints it will get – MEPs having the tendency to take themselves awfully seriously.
Hats off to Mr Deltort, who apparently spent months trawling through the European Parliament’s official attendance figures to make the website. Check it out.
*[But perhaps the attendance record of politicians from Bella Italia will change following the June elections. Berlusconi is in the process of picking up 30 woman celebs, models, and minor TV stars to give his party a new lift. Not known for their political experience, and already dubbed 'Berlusconi's Harem' in Italian media, these potential bright lights of the EU assembly are getting a crashcourse in EU history and institutions. All that being a lengthy whatever-next(!)aside.]
#1 by Dominika Pszczolkowska on April 23, 2009 - 5:58 pm
I aprreciate Mr. Deltort’s work as well, although I think it tell you more about those at the end of the list than those at the beginning. There are many excellent MEPs who don’t put many questions or don’t speak so often in plenary, so they are not at the top of the ranking. On the other hand it’s impossible to be a good MEP while you have never been to the Parliament, never spoke or written anything. So the ones at the bottom really must be hopeless
#2 by Sara Hagemann on April 24, 2009 - 9:28 am
Dear Honor,
I thought to share with you that another initiative – VoteWatch.eu – will be online from 11 May. VoteWatch.eu will give access to extensive information on the MEPs’ voting records and activities in the Parliament. It builds on the largest data set that currently exists on EU decision-makers’ public records, and rather than making it a ‘naming-and-shaming’ exercise, the intention is simply to give detailed facts and ‘evidence’ of what the MEPs do and decide at the EU level. It is hence possible to look up an individual MEP and see what he/she has voted for and against, what activities he/she has been involved in, how the party groups have acted on various policies, and how coalitions are formed in general.
The ambition is to extend this website soon to also cover the governments’ decision records, as data is increasingly available form the Council as well.
I hope you will find VoteWatch.eu an interesting and useful input to the debate!
Best regards,
Sara Hagemann
VoteWatch.eu