Party labels tell you where a politician sits in the chamber. Votes tell you what they actually did. In the European Parliament every roll-call vote is published: for each vote, the position of each Member (for, against, or abstention) is part of the official record. Vote Match turns that record into a question anyone can ask: given this Member, who voted the same way?
How it works
Choose a reference Member: search by name, or browse by country or political group. Vote Match then goes through the roll-call votes the reference Member took part in and, for every other Member, counts the votes where the two positions were identical. The result is a list ordered by the share of votes cast the same way, with the number of shared votes displayed next to every percentage so you always see how much data sits behind it.
That is the entire method. Each vote counts exactly once; there is no weighting by topic or importance, no model, and no editorial view of what the agreement means. The tool reproduces the arithmetic of the public record and stops there. Until you pick a reference Member, the list is simply alphabetical; the tool takes no view on where you should start.
What you can discover
Alignment inside a group: political groups publish whipped positions, but roll-call records show how uniformly Members actually follow them, and who diverges. Alignment across groups: coalitions in the European Parliament shift from file to file, and Vote Match makes visible which Members of other groups end up voting with your reference Member most often. National delegations: Members from one country sitting in different groups sometimes vote together on issues with a national dimension; the shared-vote percentages let you see whether that is a story or a statistic.
The same method also powers the alignment view on each Member’s profile, where you can see a Member’s agreement with their own political group and their own national delegation, computed from the same roll-call arithmetic.
Reading the numbers responsibly
Two Members agreeing in 90% of shared votes is a fact about recorded votes, not a verdict about politics. A large share of parliamentary votes are broadly consensual (procedural points, technical reports, and texts adopted by wide majorities), which lifts everyone’s baseline agreement. Percentages built on few shared votes (a Member who joined recently, or long absences) are naturally less informative, which is why the tool always shows the shared-vote count. And an abstention is treated as its own position, not as half-agreement. The numbers are the beginning of a question (why do these two vote alike?), not the end of one.
Where the record comes from
All positions come from the European Parliament’s published roll-call vote results, ingested from the Parliament’s Open Data. When the Parliament publishes a correction to a vote (a Member declaring they pressed the wrong button), the original result stands in the official record, and corrections are shown separately on Member profiles. To inspect any individual vote behind the percentages (what was voted on, and how each Member and group voted), Votes holds the full record, searchable down to the text of individual amendments.
Vote Match exists because the roll-call record, read one PDF at a time, is practically unreadable, and read together, it is one of the most revealing public datasets in EU politics. The tool does the reading; the conclusions are yours.