Professors Herman Lelieveldt and Sebastiaan Princen from the Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands published in 2011 the textbook “The Politics of the European Union“, edited by Cambridge University Press. A website related to the texbook provides some tools to better understand the EU’s actual operation and hence apply the insights from the book. Among these, the authors included a practical exercise on “How MEP’s vote: political cohesion across groups and policy areas“, based on data from VoteWatch Europe.