We present HowTheyVote.eu, a free and open-source website that makes roll-call votes in the European Parliament more accessible and transparent. We briefly showcase the site’s features and how we built it, focusing on the different official data sources we combine. We will discuss good and not-so-good practices of the European Parliament’s websites and take stock of what we learned from four years of scraping parliamentary data. Lastly, we present examples of HowTheyVote.eu data being used in journalism, research, and civil society, showcasing how accessible voting records can inform debates and thus ultimately strengthen European democracy.

The European Parliament is the only directly democratically elected EU institution, and, as such, the voting behavior of its members is of particular interest. With a significantly larger number of right-wing MEPs since last year's elections, keeping an eye on the developments in Parliament has become more important than ever. Although the Parliament publishes information such as roll-call vote results and plenary minutes on its website, it can be difficult to find out what exactly MEPs voted on or how a particular vote turned out, as the data is scattered across multiple sources, published in different formats, and made available at different times.

We started HowTheyVote.eu in 2021 as a free and open-source project to address these problems. On HowTheyVote.eu, users can search for votes and view results. We also publish our entire dataset under an open-data license.