EP Watch

Politics are often considered as very intransparent and not interesting for a broad public. This surely is the case for European politics. In order to enhance the transparancy and to make the real political deeds - the voting behaviour- more easily accessible I have written a small script that analyses the roll-call vote records as published on the website of the European Parliament.

It converts a long list with names after each amendment into a compact HTML table that is suitable for inclusion on websites. These tables also offer a better overview of the voting behaviour of a single MEP or political group. Moreover, you can also enter voting recommendations and look which MEPs followed your advice. This way I hope it can be a helpful tool for NGOs.

How it works

Get the PDF with the roll-call votes from the website of the European Parliament:

Go to http://www.europarl.europa.eu/
English > Activities tab > Parliamentary Business sub-tab > Minutes in the left column > date of the vote (click the icon on the right)
Go to the bottom of the page and open Roll-call votes (the PDF version, I have not tried to process the word version yet)

Now copy and paste all of the amendments you want to be analyzed into a textfile (just copy and paste the whole block, including page numbers etc). An example of such a file can be found here.
Make sure you have python installed
Run the script for the first time: python epwatch.py outcome.txt
A new file, called votinglist.csv, will be created in the current directory. Open it and enter your recommendation after the comma (use a + or -). Have a look at an example file.
Now run the script again:

python epwatch.py outcome.txt to create one long table for all MEPs [example output]
python epwatch.py outcome.txt -g to create one table for every political group [example output]

If you want to change the colours used then have a look at the epwatch.css file.

Colour legend

green background: the MEP followed the recommendation
red background: the MEP did not follow the recommendation
gray background: the MEP abstained
white background: the MEP did not vote at all

Download

Get the script and some example files here.

Further development

It would be nice to have an option that creates a table for every memberstate. For feature suggestions and bug reports please contact me at dietvu /at/ village.uunet.be.

License

The EP watch script is available under the GPL.