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A new website, http://www.votewatch.eu/, was launched this week with the noble aim of improving transparency in the European Union affairs’s and perhaps even raising the quality of EU public debate. Its main achievement is that, for the first time, it makes the voting records of members of the European Parliament available online. Later this year or early in 2010, the website will be expanded to include coverage of votes in the EU’s Council of Ministers, which groups the 27 member-states’ governments.
In a sense, it’s surprising that it’s taken so long for an initiative like this to get going. In the US, the voting records of congressmen are a key issue at election time. They are subjected to relentless scrutiny by all sorts of interest groups and activists as well as academics and other impartial analysts.
In the European Parliament - which is the EU’s only directly elected institution and which has steadily increased its powers over the past 20 years - I doubt that more than a handful of the most dedicated specialists could tell you how legislators have voted since the last EU-wide election in 2004. It is yet another example of how, overall, the quality of democracy is substantially higher in the US than in Europe.
Yet it would be unfair to call the European Parliament a secretive institution. Details about the assembly’s votes are faithfully recorded on its website. If you are a citizen of a EU country and want to know how your MEP has been voting, there’s nothing to stop you finding out.
However, as Simon Hix and Sara Hagemann, the founders of www.votewatch.eu, point out, it has always been exceptionally difficult for an average citizen to make sense of broader trends in the European Parliament. How often do MEPs of a particular nationality vote with each other, regardless of their political affiliation? How often do they put cross-national party allegiances above national solidarity? How often does a certain notorious minority of them even show up to do a day’s work?
As ever, reality intrudes. When I was with Hix and Hagemann at the website’s launch in Brussels on Monday, a questioner in the audience asked if their initiative was likely to encourage higher participation in the forthcoming European Parliament elections on June 4-7.
The answer? Sadly, but predictably, a flat “No”.
I have been the FT's Brussels bureau chief since September 2007 and was previously the bureau chief in Frankfurt and Rome. In this blog you'll find my thoughts on everything from the European Union's foreign and economic policies to the fortunes of its political leaders - as well as the more light-hearted aspects of life in Europe.
