How to use SearchMEP

Quick start

Enter one or more criteria in the search panel. Criteria are combined: results must satisfy all active filters.
Click Search. Use Reset to clear all filters, selections, pagination and optional second party/group fields. A new search also clears the previous MEP selection so that an extraction cannot accidentally mix two searches.
Results first appear as one line per MEP. Use Expand all, Expand selected MEPs or click a MEP name to display the matched political affiliation intervals.
Select one or more MEPs if you want to extract their complete affiliation records.
Use the extraction buttons to export individual MEPs, groups, parties, or selected MEP complete trajectories.
On a phone, use Show search filters and Hide search filters to move between the search form and the result cards without a second scrollable panel.

Search criteria

Criterion	What it matches
Name	MEP names containing the entered text. The search is not case-sensitive and ignores accents.
Gender	Gender value recorded in the dataset: `F` or `M`. The current reviewed release contains no unresolved `unknown` gender values.
Country	Country labels as reported on the official English European Parliament pages.
EP Term	Parliamentary terms from 1979 onward, displayed with their date ranges.
EP group	Choose a listed European political group for an exact match, or enter part of a name for a broader search. Use +add group for cross search to require that the same MEP matched another group within the same active temporal and role scope.
National Party	Choose a listed national party for an exact match, or enter part of a label for a broader search. Use +add party for cross search to require that the same MEP matched another national party within the same active temporal and role scope.
Exact date	MEPs with at least one affiliation interval active on the selected date, including start and end dates. Searchable dates run from 17 July 1979 through the data cut-off of 7 July 2026.
Time interval	MEPs with at least one affiliation interval overlapping the selected period. The start and end dates entered in the filter are included in the search.
Group Role	Roles held within a European political group, such as Member, Chair or Vice-Chair. Choose a listed role for an exact match. Chair or Co-Chair is an explicit combined option.
EP roles	European Parliament roles recorded in `epRoles` or EP bodies recorded in `epBodies`. Choose a listed role or body for an exact match, or enter a fragment for a broader search. These fields are searchable and exportable, but they do not create political affiliation intervals.
Committees & Delegations	Committee and delegation memberships or substitute memberships recorded in the dataset. Listed values match exactly; freely entered fragments remain partial searches.
ID	Exact European Parliament MEP ID. Unlike other text fields, this filter does not perform partial matching: entering `1` returns only ID `1`.

EP group suggestions are ordered by the first parliamentary term in which each label appears. Prefixes such as T1: or T3, T5, T6: show every term containing that exact label. Within the same first term, labels confined to one term are listed alphabetically before labels spanning several terms.

In fields with a suggestion list, choosing a listed value performs an exact match. Typing a fragment that is not the complete listed value performs a case-insensitive partial search. For example, Group of the European Right matches only that group, while European Right also finds Technical Group of the European Right. Likewise, exact Chair excludes Co-Chair and Vice-Chair; choose Chair or Co-Chair to combine only the first two. Partial entries such as memb or bureau remain broad searches. Name remains a partial text search and ID remains strictly exact. The EP group and National Party second fields use symmetric intersection logic. Every selected group and party must occur in a matching interval within the temporal, term, role and service scope set by the other filters. Two selected groups or parties do not have to be simultaneous, but they must both fall within that common scope. For this reason, combining an exact date with two distinct groups or parties will normally return no result; the interface displays a warning rather than silently broadening the date scope.

Simple display and selective expansion

The default display shows one line per individual MEP. The main line reports the first matched political affiliation interval available for that MEP in the current results; when final values differ, they are displayed underneath in grey italic text. Every value in a snapshot comes from the same temporal context: an affiliation that begins later is not moved artificially into an earlier snapshot.

Matching interval gives the start and end dates of the stable term/party/group/group-role interval returned by the search. Total MEP service separately gives the complete period or periods during which the MEP served in Parliament. Official interruptions are preserved. For an exact-date search, the political interval is the stable interval containing the searched date, not the MEP’s complete period of service. An open end labelled Ongoing at data cut-off means that the source recorded no end date as of 7 July 2026; it is not a claim about service after that date.

Use Expand all to display one line per affiliation interval for all MEPs on the current result page, or Expand selected MEPs to expand only selected MEPs. Clicking a MEP name also expands or collapses that MEP directly. Pagination remains based on individual MEPs, not on the technical interval rows inserted under expanded MEPs.

Expanded interval rows indicate which type of change created the interval, for example party change, group change, term change or group role change. A return after any positive gap in official EP service starts a new interval and is labelled Return. Simultaneous changes are summarised as Multiple changes, with details available on hover.

What is an affiliation interval?

An affiliation interval is not one MEP. It is a dated segment of a MEP’s parliamentary trajectory during which the relevant affiliation and role variables remain stable.

A new interval is created when any tracked affiliation or role changes: parliamentary term, national party, European political group or political group role.

EP roles, EP bodies, committee memberships, delegation memberships and Additional roles are attached to the political interval in which they occur. They can be searched, displayed and exported, but changes in these fields do not create additional interval rows.

The result summary distinguishes Total MEPs from affiliation intervals. Use Total MEPs for person-level counts and affiliation intervals for trajectory-level analysis.

Active filters are shown above the export buttons as removable chips. The interface explicitly states: “Showing only affiliation intervals matching the current search filters. Expand a MEP for all matching intervals. Use ‘Extract MEP full career(s)’ for complete affiliations and trajectories.”

Read, sort and select results

Use Sort by or click a table heading to sort the results. Results initially appear in official family-name alphabetical order; Reset restores that order.
Sorting by Name follows the MEP order published in the official English all-terms directory, which is ordered by family name. Displayed names remain exactly as stored in SearchMEP; no automatic given-name/family-name split is applied.
Use Results per page to display 50, 100 or 250 results per page.
Selecting any visible result selects the corresponding MEP. Selection is person-level, not interval-level.
The checkbox in the table header selects the MEPs currently visible on the page.
The Matching term column uses compact labels such as T9; hover over the value to see the full term range.
Long committee, delegation and Additional roles cells are visually limited in the simple table. Their complete contents remain available on hover, after expansion and in complete-career exports.
Copy search filters, displayed beside the Filters heading and above the active filters, copies a URL containing exactly those filters without reloading the dataset. The link does not preserve selections, sorting, pagination or expanded rows.

Export results

Choose View, Excel or CSV in the Format menu, then use one of the extraction buttons. View opens a printable and explorable report in a new tab; Excel downloads an .xlsx workbook; CSV downloads an interoperable text data file. Excel files are generated locally in the browser only when requested.

Extract MEPs exports the list of individual MEPs returned by the current search, without duplicates, using the simple display logic. It records the first and last matching political snapshots, complete MEP service periods and the number of matched political intervals.
Extract groups exports the unique groups represented in the matched affiliation intervals, with terms, first and last dates, MEP count, countries, party count and active filter summary.
Extract parties exports the unique national parties represented in the matched affiliation intervals, with terms, first and last dates, MEP count, countries, group count and active filter summary.
Extract MEP full career(s) exports the complete political affiliation trajectories for the selected MEPs, including service-affiliation details attached to each political interval.

Selected MEP pathway charts are still based on European political group and national party trajectories. The additional EP service fields are displayed and exported as data, but they are not added to the graphical pathway.

The column Additional roles covers Chair, Vice-Chair, Vice-President, Observer and Substitute Observer roles recorded for committees, delegations and joint assemblies.

Examples

Find a MEP’s party trajectory: search by name, select the MEP, then use Extract MEP full career(s).
Find MEPs who changed group: enter a value in EP group, add a second group field, then search.
Compare a national party across EP groups: filter by National Party, then use Extract groups.
List parties represented in a political group: filter by EP group, then use Extract parties.
Study a legislative period: filter by EP Term or by a Time interval.

Data sources and construction

SearchMEP is a static web application backed by a generated dataset. The core affiliation data are collected from the official European Parliament website in English: the complete MEP directory, individual profiles and parliamentary-term history pages.

Gender is added as a supplementary field. It is inferred from the official French European Parliament pages when the source text distinguishes masculine and feminine forms such as suppléant and suppléante. Cases that cannot be inferred safely can be reviewed manually from the official EP profile, the MEP’s first name and the EP profile photo together. Ambiguous cases remain coded as unknown.

Source labels are preserved and national party names are not harmonised. Missing dates are not inferred. SearchMEP is not an official European Parliament product.

The downloadable JSON retains detailed institutional-service boundaries so that role searches remain temporally precise. The interface aggregates those losslessly into political intervals. The dataset URL is versioned for browser caching. The application requests the deterministic gzip representation directly; browsers decompress it automatically before parsing the JSON. The original JSON remains the authoritative, readable data file and a loading fallback if a server cannot deliver the compressed resource.

Two impossible date ranges occur in the raw official service-role source (one Carlo Tognoli delegation record and one Giacomo Leopardi delegation record). They are preserved and listed in the quality-control files for traceability, but do not occur in the public political-interval table. Blank or explicit “no party” source values are likewise reported rather than imputed.

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