Amendments

Attendance

'Attendance' refers to the number of days an MEP is present out of the days the Parliament is in session. See the Guide to VoteWatch.eu for how the attendance information is collected and coded. We rely on the Parliament's own attendance register combined with the information on whether an MEP is present at votes. We will shortly elaborate on the attendance information by making distinctions between attendance to the plenary for the whole day (by signing in the registry), attendance in voting, and attendance to relevant Committees and will include these as three separate categories on the website.

European Party Groups

The European Party Groups resemble the political 'families' known from the national political level. At the moment there are seven political groups formed by the national party delegations in the European Parliament:

• the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, PES;
• the Group of the European People's Party, EPP-ED (Conservatives/ Christian Democrats)
• the Group of the Alliance of the Liberals and Democrats for Europe, ALDE;
• the Union for Europe of the Nations Group, UEN;
• the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance, Greens/EFA
• the Confederal Group of the European United Left - Nordic Green Left, GUE-NGL;
• the Independence/Democracy Group, IND/DEM.

More information about each of the groups can be found here.

MEP

MEP is the acronym that stands for 'Member of the European Parliament'. Members of the European Parliament are national representatives who are elected every five years in each Member State for a seat in the European Parliament. The last elections were held in 2004 and the coming elections will be held from 4-7 June 2009. The official website for the European Parliament can be found here.

National Parties/National Party Delegations

The representatives in the European Parliament are elected on the basis of the political system and political rules in their member states (see here for further details). Each country has a delegation of representatives that are divided along party lines and take their seats in the European Parliament on the basis of the national party lists. Here, we refer to these various delegations as the 'national party delegations' or simply as the 'national parties'.

Parliamentary Questions (PQs)

Members of the European Parliament can ask questions to the European Commission or to the Council of the European Union (where the governments are represented through their ministers). To see the details and procedures for how questions can be asked by the MEPs and answered by the Council and Commission, please refer to the EU's EUR-Lex website: here.

Voting records

Voting records are the summaries we have put together from the official lists available from the European Parliament on the voting positions of all MEPs on a proposal. The MEPs can either support (vote 'Yes'), oppose ('No') or abstain from voting. We collect the information and put them into categories (according to the methodology explained here). The records are publicly available from the European Parliament's website.