(Sommerabend / Baluschek, Hans 1870–1935)

Is there a pattern in our MEP vote behavior ?

Using the data retrieved from the Vote Watch NGO website for the 2014-19 European Parliementary session, i tried to rebuild this nice plot from the economist :

You can see the vizualisation here and download the raw data from the about section.

The source code is available here

Methodology

i first scrapped the complete voting history for all the 800+ MEP members. Then i used a PCA on the member / votes matrix. The resulting visualization shows the first and second Principal Components (between 91 an 98% of the explained variance).