Methodology & data sources

Everything on this site traces back to official, public records. This page documents where each figure comes from and how we process it. The pipeline is run daily; every entity page shows the date its data last changed.

1. MEP lobby-meeting declarations (the core dataset)

Under Article 7 of the MEP Code of Conduct, MEPs must publish meetings held with interest representatives; since November 2023 this applies to all MEPs. The source of record is each MEP's declaration documents on europarl.europa.eu, linked from every profile page here. We scrape these daily, on a rotating schedule, and merge them with Transparency International's Integrity Watch EU bulk feed (the historical base; that feed stopped updating in June 2025, since when our own daily collection is the only source of new declarations).

2. Matching counterparts to the Transparency Register

Declared counterparts are free text. A counterpart entry is register-linked at source only when the MEP's declaration carries a Transparency Register ID. Separately, we try to resolve unlinked names to a Register identity; those inferred matches let spelling variants share an organisation profile and ranking, but never turn an unlinked declaration into a source-linked one. Roughly 48.6% of eligible counterpart entries carry a declared Register link. Entries naming diplomatic or government bodies (which cannot register) are excluded from the site-wide headline, political-group, monthly, weekly and annual rates. Individual MEP profiles instead show the raw declared-link share across all of their counterpart entries, including diplomatic and government entries, and compare it with the same raw Parliament-wide denominator. Legacy weekly winner cards retain the raw rate used by their historical selection formula and label it accordingly.

3. Organisation category, sector and spend

Category (company, business group, NGO, think tank, union …) follows the register's own taxonomy plus a reviewed classification for unregistered counterparts. Industry/sector is a keyword classification over the organisation's name, stated goals and register sub-category - it is a label we compute, not an official field. Declared lobbying spend comes from LobbyFacts.eu, which republishes register filings.

The most-met organisations - 1,477 of them, keyed on the Transparency Register ID so every spelling of a name inherits the same answer - carry sector labels reviewed organisation by organisation: each labelled independently by three reviewers working from different evidence and adjudicated, then tested against blind samples the reviewers never saw (about 96% right). The remaining, less-met organisations carry the keyword classifier's label, which is measurably weaker: on the 480-organisation human-reviewed set kept in this repository it is right 315 times (66%), and a blind sample of 100 small organisations in August 2026 put it at 59%. Sector labels on low-volume organisations should be read with that in mind; every label is open to correction.

More than one sector

An organisation can genuinely belong to several. The German municipal utilities association states in its own filing that its members work in energy, water, wastewater, waste and telecommunications - reporting only the strongest of those would be a loss of information rather than a simplification. Where a second or third sector scores within 55% of the leading one, it is shown after the headline sector as also. The headline sector is what the rankings and sector pages use; the others say where else the organisation belongs.

Four tie-break rules

Four boundaries recur often enough that leaving them to judgement produced inconsistent answers - the same kind of organisation landing in different sectors depending on the wording of its filing. They are settled by rule:

1. Rights before subject. An organisation that campaigns for rights takes Human rights & humanitarian even when its subject is technology. A body that sets standards or runs infrastructure takes Technology & digital. So digital-rights groups sit with human rights, not with the industry they scrutinise.
2. Animals: welfare, farming or medicine. Animal welfare and protection campaigning is Environment & climate; breeding, livestock and farm bodies are Agriculture & food; the animal-health industry and veterinary professions are Health & pharma.
3. Press: freedom, publishing or labour. Press-freedom campaigners are Human rights & humanitarian; publishers and broadcasters and their trade bodies are Media & publishing; journalists' unions are Labour & trade unions.
4. Watchdogs follow their subject only if they have one. A watchdog devoted to a single industry takes that industry - a finance watchdog is Finance. A watchdog of governance, lobbying or transparency in general takes Human rights & humanitarian.

These are editorial choices, not facts about the organisations, which is why they are written down here rather than left implicit in a keyword list.

4. Counting rules

Two different units appear in this dataset and we keep them apart, because they differ by about a quarter:

• A declared meeting is one entry in a member's declaration - one member, one date, one subject. A meeting that names six organisations is one meeting. There are 91,711 of these.
• A counterpart entry is one organisation named in one meeting, so the six-organisation meeting above contributes six. There are 114,963 of these. This is the right unit for counterpart-level coverage and classification, and the wrong one for "how many meetings".

Every figure the site labels "meetings" is the first unit. The second unit is used only when the property belongs to a counterpart - for example, whether an organisation was linked to the Transparency Register or how it was classified - and is explicitly named as counterpart entries.

• Site-wide totals cover the full record (2019–2026) for current members.
• Per-MEP and per-party figures cover the current term (from 16 July 2024), so every member is measured over the same window.
• All figures are counts of declared meetings. We do not estimate undeclared activity.
• Rankings order MEPs by declared meeting records; they are statements about declaration volume, never about integrity or compliance.

5. The two labels: "the black box" and "the sloppy"

Two labels describe how a member fills in the declaration, not the member. Both are computed from the same data as everything else on this site, and both are stated here in full so the claim and its limits arrive together.

The black box

Given to a member who took their seat on or before the date exactly two years before the build, and for whom no lobby meeting appears anywhere in the record we hold — not in the current term, and not in the 2019–2026 archive. The two-year rule is what separates this from "has declared nothing this term": a member sworn in last month has published nothing because they have not had time to, which is a different fact. Mid-term arrival dates come from the Parliament's own incoming-members list.

What it does not mean. An empty record is not evidence of a rule breach and not proof that no meeting took place. Since November 2023 the obligation under Article 7 covers every member's scheduled meetings with interest representatives on matters relating to Parliament's business, so an empty record means no such meeting was declared - not that none was due. The label records the absence of a declaration, which is the only thing this site can observe.

One exclusion. The President of the European Parliament is not included: the Presidency publishes its engagements through a separate channel from the MEP meetings register this site reads, so a zero there would measure where we look rather than what was declared.

The sloppy

Given to a member when both of the following hold across what they published this term:

1. At least 25% carries no Register ID. The declaration names an organisation but does not link it, so the meeting cannot be traced to the body it was with.
2. At least 25% of those name an organisation we can nonetheless find in the Register. This is the gate that separates carelessness from circumstance: it shows the link existed to be made.

Without the second test the label would fall on members whose counterparts simply are not registrable. Without the first, it would fall on members who link almost everything.

The unit is the counterpart entry, not the meeting, because a Register link attaches to an organisation: a meeting naming three bodies can have two linked and one not, so "carries no link" has no meaning at meeting level. Members with fewer than 10 published entries are not judged at all - at that size a single entry decides both percentages, and the label would describe a row rather than a person.

What is excluded, and why. Counterparts that cannot hold a Register entry at all — diplomatic missions and government bodies — are removed from both figures. Meetings held before the organisation joined the Register, since there was no entry to link to at the time. Entries where the member typed the Register number into the free-text field, which is disclosure in the wrong box rather than a failure to disclose. And matches resting on a free-text string that names several organisations at once, which cannot support a claim about any one of them.

The match is ours, not the member's. We infer the organisation from the name typed into the declaration. As in section 2, that inference never turns an unlinked declaration into a source-linked one, and it is not a finding that the member was obliged to link it.

6. How the "MEP of the week" is chosen

Since week 2026-W30, the MEP of the week is the member with the most meetings published in the last completed week that were at most 14 days old at publication and whose declaration carried a Transparency Register link. "Published" means the declaration first appeared in our daily collection of the official EP pages - the closest observable proxy for the moment of publication. A completed publication week never changes afterwards, so the choice is final the moment it is made. Ties break on the number of distinct registered organisations, then on total publications. The public archive begins at 2026-W30, when the site went live; we do not back-fill editions for weeks before then, even though an earlier meeting-date formula could compute them retrospectively.

Known limitation: "first seen" is when this site first read a declaration, not when the member published it. Since 6 September 2026 every member's page is read every two days, so the lag is at most about two days and varies by member within that. Before then the rotation was much slower, and collection stopped entirely between 23 July and 6 September 2026: weeks that touch that gap, or the catch-up days after it, are not scored at all rather than scored as empty, and a week observed only partly (2026-W30 was seen Monday to Thursday) is marked with the number of days observed.

7. Quality control

Each daily build re-runs the counterpart-type classifier (company, NGO, union …) against a reference list of named organisations and fails the build if, with at least 30 tested, fewer than 97% reproduce. This is not the sector classifier described above. In this build, 263 of 263 reference labels were reproduced. This is a repeatability gate, not an estimate of the classifier's accuracy on every possible organisation. Separately, the build passed 8 of 8 automated integrity checks; the audit detail ships with the public dataset.

8. Roll-call votes

Vote data comes from the European Parliament's own Open Data Portal, which publishes each recorded vote with the full list of members who voted for, against and abstained. Members are identified by the Parliament's own numeric id - the same one used throughout this site - so no name matching is involved.

What is and is not here. Only roll-call votes are recorded by name. Votes taken by show of hands, and secret ballots, are not: they are absent from this dataset entirely rather than counted as anything. About one roll-call in ten is the binding final vote on a text; the rest are amendments, split votes and procedural motions. "Final vote on a text" means a vote classified as such from the Parliament's own label for it, and the share of labels we cannot classify is published as a quality check.

A missing vote is not absenteeism. The Parliament publishes who voted, never who was absent or why, and keeps no public excused-absence register. A member with no vote recorded may have been on parliamentary business, ill, on leave, or present without voting. We therefore report "roll-calls with a vote recorded" and never "attendance" or "participation". The President of the Parliament chairs sittings and does not vote, so no voting record is published for the office-holder.

Denominators. A member is measured only against the roll-calls held while they actually held the seat, taken from their membership record - which is also how members who have since left keep the denominator they had. Political group is resolved as of the date of each vote, never as of today: 21 members changed group during this term, and scoring their earlier votes against their current group would misrepresent every one of them.

Group majorities. A group has a majority on a vote when more than half of its members who cast a vote went the same way. With three positions available a group can split without any majority, and those votes are excluded from comparisons rather than resolved by a plurality. Members sitting with no group are excluded from group comparisons: they are not a bloc with a line to take. Groups are not bound to vote together in any case - a Member's mandate is personal and exercised freely - so voting with one's group is not a virtue and differing from it is not a fault.

Corrections. The Parliament publishes vote corrections and voting intentions after the fact, stating that they "do not alter the result of the vote as announced in plenary". We record them and never count them. Because corrections keep arriving for about two weeks after a sitting, each sitting is re-fetched over a 21-day window before its record is treated as settled.

9. Known limitations

• Declarations are self-reported and published with delay; the record lags reality.
• Free-text counterparts can defeat matching; we surface the unmatched share.
• The sector classifier is heuristic and labelled as such wherever it appears.
• Lobby meetings carry no dossier reference, so they cannot be linked to a particular law. Nothing here claims a meeting was about a given vote.

Licence & reuse

EU Transparency Register and EP data: © European Union, reusable under the EP/EC reuse policies. Roll-call vote data: © European Union, reusable under CC BY 4.0. Which roll-call is the final vote on a text is our own classification, derived from the Parliament's published label for each vote - no third-party vote dataset is used, so nothing here is encumbered by a share-alike licence. LobbyFacts data: © Corporate Europe Observatory / LobbyControl. Our derived dataset and computations: CC BY 4.0 - cite "MEP of the week" and link the page you used. Journalists and researchers: contact@mepoftheweek.com for the full dataset or questions about method.