The European Institute for Participative Democracy (Qvorum) published today a study on the activity of Romanian MEPs in a one year period (January 2008- February 2009) during their current mandate.
The goal of the NGOs study is two-fold: on the one hand, to look into how the MEPs contributed, through their activity, to stimulating participative democracy, and, on the other hand, to consolidate people’s trust in the European Parliament by empowering them to take an informed decision when voting for their MEPs in June 2009. The study is based on activity reports (voluntarily submitted to the NGO by a part of the MEPs), personal pages on the EP website, personal websites and/or blogs as well as the presence at plenary debates and at committee meetings. The main criteria used throughout the study were the way the MEPs relate to the citizens they represent, the transparency of their activity, as well as the relevance of their actions for the overall EP output.
The study is mainly made up by short profiles of each Romanian MEP, containing both quantitative data (presence at debates, number of reports and amendments drafted, number of interventions in plenary, etc), and qualitative information about their work (main topics addressed, social groups represented, other activities in which they were involved, etc). Moreover, the communication with the citizens was also analysed, focusing on accessibility (email address and other contact details), the quality of the information posted on the website, as well as the openness to discuss with the people though a blog.
Taking into account all these various aspects, the MEPs activity ìs assessed as either: ” weak”, “medium”, “good” or “very good”. Overall the picture does not look too bad, and the fact that the study sheds light on the specific areas each MEP focused on turns out to be very useful and reduces the risk of generalisation. Moreover, the study (which you can read here) is written in a very clear and reader-friendly manner and can be a very good information tool in the upcoming elections campaign.
And, what is more important, it sets a good example of what more NGOs (and not necessarily think tanks!) from other member states could do in a drive towards more transparency and increasing people’s interst and trust in the MEPs they are electing.
So where are similar reports from other countries that assess the performance of MEPs? What happened to the MEP tracking website? Votewatch.eu is still not launched… and the EP elections are coming closer. In an ideal world this kind of data would have been used by political parties in the nomination process…
I just organised a workshop (http://www.epractice.eu/publicservices) where Adrian Moraru came to present the website for monitoring the EP. You can watch his intervention here http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1259150 .
Highly interesting that they didn’t manage to get EU money for the project, which was instead funded by an American grant.
All the content of the workshop is available here: http://www.pageflakes.com/eups20/
Thanks for the links. Sounds very interesting. Actually I am not sure whether a project like that needs EU funding as it is a classic civil society project (also national sites rarely get governmental funding).
However, the problem of the data format is of course an annoying thing and should be changed by the EP. Has there been any statement from the EP IT team on the issue?
There is also many European foundations that might be interested in a project like that. Did Adrian Moraru mention the votewatch.eu project at all? As far as I understood it from the Euractiv letter the IPPR is working together with the EPC in Brussels on it?
Certainly something that should be followed up. Found the following which seems ‘almost’ there. http://epvote.eu/
Created by http://www.noiseinthewires.com/.
Thanks a lot. It does look very promising indeed.
[...] announced already a while ago, was finally launched today. It is quite a complex tool, which analyses various aspects of the [...]