Glossary

Definitions for the terms used across AmendEU — from EP jargon to this site’s own metrics.

The Parliament

MEP#: Member of the European Parliament, directly elected in one of the member states — 720 seats in the current term. Every Member page on this site covers one MEP's career since 2008.
Political group#: MEPs sit by political affinity, not nationality. A group needs at least 23 Members elected in at least a quarter of the member states; Members who join no group sit as Non-attached.
Committee#: One of about twenty standing bodies, each covering a policy field and known by a four-letter code (ENVI, ECON, LIBE…). Committees examine draft laws in detail — this is where the amendments this site counts are tabled.
Plenary#: All Members sitting together — about once a month in Strasbourg, with shorter sittings in Brussels. The plenary debates each text and takes the votes that adopt or reject it.
Parliamentary term#: The five-year period between European elections. AmendEU covers the 6th (2004–2009), 7th (2009–2014), 8th (2014–2019), 9th (2019–2024) and 10th (2024–now) terms; the 6th is partially covered, as machine-readable committee amendments begin in 2008.
Rapporteur#: The Member a committee appoints to lead Parliament's work on one text: they draft the report, negotiate the compromises, and usually table many solo amendments.
Shadow rapporteur#: The Member each of the other political groups appoints to follow the same text — tracking the rapporteur's work and negotiating compromises on their group's behalf.

Legislation

Procedure (dossier)#: One law or resolution making its way through Parliament, tracked as a single file with a reference like 2022/0051(COD)— year, file number and procedure type. Parliament insiders say “dossier”; this site says “procedure”.
Procedure types#: The letters in a procedure reference. COD: ordinary legislative procedure — Parliament and the Council of the EU decide together; how most EU laws are made. INI: own-initiative report — Parliament states a position, not itself a law. BUD: the EU’s annual budget. RSP: a resolution on a topical subject.
Committee amendment#: A written proposal by named Members to change a specific part of a draft text while it is in committee — delete, add or reword a passage — each published in an official document with its authors listed. These are the amendments AmendEU counts: every headline figure on the site is committee amendments.
Plenary amendment#: A separate series of amendments tabled for the sitting itself, by the committee responsible, a political group or a group of Members acting together, and numbered independently from the committee series. AmendEU keeps the two apart: committee amendments are the headline count, while plenary amendments appear only through the plenary votes on them.
Roll-call vote#: A vote in which each Member's choice — for, against or abstain — is recorded by name. Roll calls are mandatory for final votes on legislation and happen elsewhere on request; votes by show of hands leave no per-Member record, which is why only roll-call votes can be shown here.

Reading the numbers

Solo vs co-signed#: Most committee amendments are co-signed by several Members acting together; a solo amendment is tabled by one Member alone, often the rapporteur. AmendEU credits an amendment to every listed author, so per-Member counts are attribution-based: a co-signed amendment counts once for each of its co-authors, while a procedure's total counts each distinct amendment once.
Amendment hotspots#: On procedure pages, the breakdown of a text's amendments by where they land in the legal text — Article 3, Recital 15, Annex I. It shows which passages of a draft law drew the most attempted changes.
Coverage window#: The period the site’s figures cover — 2008 → ~July 2026 · 5 terms — stated on every page and never silently extended. The data is refreshed with each data run, usually weekly; counts are exact within the window, and the most recent months are a lower bound: their figures can only go up at the next refresh. Full detail in the methodology.
Likely positions#: A statistical baseline from past roll-call votes, shown on open procedures: how each political group has usually voted on similar files. It is history, not a forecast.

Where the data comes from

Parltrack#: An independent open-data project that has been turning the Parliament’s documents into machine-readable records since 2008. Its bulk dataset is the backbone of this site’s amendment data, published under the Open Database Licence. parltrack.org ↗
European Parliament Open Data#: The Parliament’s own open-data portal and official documents (© European Union) — the source for procedure titles, Member metadata and the most recently published amendment documents. data.europarl.europa.eu ↗
HowTheyVote.eu#: An open project that republishes the European Parliament’s plenary roll-call voting records. Every vote shown on AmendEU comes from it. howtheyvote.eu ↗

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