Methodology

Attendance

Citizens register with a verified email and phone number (Tier 1) or through bank-based identity verification (Tier 2). Each citizen can express one position per legislative procedure: support, oppose, or undecided.

After reading the neutral summary of a procedure, citizens must wait a minimum of 30 seconds before submitting their position. This friction is intentional — it discourages reflexive reactions and encourages engagement with the substance.

Positions can be changed at any time. All changes are audited but individual positions are never publicly exposed.

Group loyalty

The MEP alignment score measures how often an MEP's vote matches the citizen majority sentiment:

A vote is "aligned" when the MEP voted "for" and the citizen majority is "support", or the MEP voted "against" and the citizen majority is "oppose". Only procedures with 50+ citizen positions are included.

Alignment scores should not be interpreted as a quality metric for MEPs. Representatives are elected to exercise judgment, not to mirror public opinion polls.

Legislative stage

The "gap" measures the difference between citizen sentiment and MEP voting outcomes on the same procedure. The gap metric is only calculated when a procedure has at least 50 citizen positions and at least 1 MEP vote.

A high gap does not inherently indicate a problem — MEPs may have access to information, committee briefings, or compromise considerations that citizens do not. The gap is a signal for further investigation, not a verdict.

GovLens uses a tiered verification system: Tier 1 (phone verification) is sufficient for basic participation; Tier 2 (bank identity via iDIN/BankID) provides the strongest guarantee against duplicate accounts. API consumers can filter sentiment data by verification tier.

Caveats

This is not a representative sample — GovLens users are self-selecting
Demographic skew: participation varies by country, age, and education level
Selection bias: people with strong opinions are more likely to participate
Language barrier: the platform is primarily in English
Digital divide: requires internet access and technical literacy
Verification coverage: Tier 2 (bank ID) is only available in select countries
GovLens is not a poll — there is no random sampling
GovLens is not a referendum platform — positions have no binding power
GovLens is not a lobbying tool — we are non-partisan and do not advocate

Ask GovLens — how AI answers work

Ask GovLens is an AI research assistant that answers questions using only GovLens data: legislative procedures and their stage history, MEP votes and voting records, and the EU Transparency Register with Commission meeting disclosures. It cannot answer questions outside that corpus — opinions, predictions, legal advice, or non-EU politics are refused with an explanation rather than guessed at.

Citation verification. Every sentence in an answer must carry at least one citation to a GovLens entity. Before a sentence reaches you, each of its citations is re-checked against the database — quoted values must match the stored record. Sentences that fail this check are removed, and the answer tells you how many were removed. If most of an answer fails verification, the whole answer is withheld.

Generated-content labelling. Answers are AI-generated and are labelled as such wherever they appear — in the chat, in copied text, and in dossier exports. Generated text is never presented as editorial fact; the citations, which link to primary GovLens records, are the factual layer. Answers are produced with a large language model via OpenRouter; the model in use is disclosed in our runbook and may change as quality gates are re-run.

Logging. Questions and answers are logged without personal data to measure answer quality (verification rates, refusals) and to build evaluation sets from reported answers. Retention windows are documented in the privacy policy.

Questions about our methodology? methodology@govlens.eu Read our democratic responsibility statement