Where do our figures come from, and who uses them?

Public data from the authorities

Bills, votes, subsidies, contracts and spending come from official, public sources. We import them automatically and always credit the source.

• Federal ChamberChamber of Representatives (dekamer.be)
• Flemish ParliamentFlanders Open Data Licence
• Walloon ParliamentOpen data from the Walloon Parliament
• Brussels ParliamentNon-commercial use only: this data is not included in the data for partners.
• SubsidiesFlemish government (CC0), FWB via ODWB (CC BY 4.0), FPS BOSA and City of Brussels (CC0)
• European ParliamentEuropean Parliament open data (CC BY 4.0). We add up the roll-call votes by group and by country.
• Public contractsTED, Publications Office of the European Union
• Public spendingEurostat (CC BY 4.0)
• Prices and indexEurostat, harmonised index of consumer prices (CC BY 4.0); Statbel, health index (CC BY 4.0)
• Foreign aidOECD, official development assistance; European Commission, Financial Transparency System (CC BY 4.0); FPS Foreign Affairs, projects (IATI, ODC-PDDL)
• Support to UkraineKiel Institute, Ukraine Support Tracker: only totals per country, with attribution (no open licence, not in partner exports)
• Municipalities and populationStatbel and BOSA (CC BY 4.0)
• Government revenue and debtEurostat (CC BY 4.0)
• Municipal councilsLokaal Beslist, Flemish government (published by the municipalities). Items about people are shown without details.
• Lobbying at the EUEU Transparency Register and meetings of the European Commission (reuse with attribution). Self-employed persons are not shown.
• Petitions and citizens’ initiativesChamber (mijnopinie), Brussels Parliament (democratie.brussels), European Commission (citizens' initiatives and consultations). Never who submitted a petition.
• Agenda of the parliamentsOpen data from the European, Flemish and Walloon Parliaments
• From proposal to lawBelgian Official Journal via Justel (FPS Justice) and EUR-Lex (Publications Office of the EU)

The plain-language summaries are written by an AI (Google Gemini) based on the official documents. If in doubt, always read the official text.

How we count citizens' votes

• Your vote is kept separate from your account. Nobody, not even us, can see who voted for what.
• We never show figures for a group smaller than 50 people. We combine smaller groups or leave them out.
• We round numbers to the nearest ten, so nobody can work back to the exact figures.
• For a vote we only keep your age group and your province (and your municipality if it has more than 20,000 inhabitants, for internal use only). Never your name, your postcode or your gender.
• People who vote here do so of their own accord. This is not a random sample, so it is not a representative poll.
• That is why we also produce a weighted result: we count each age group and province as it appears in the Belgian population (figures from Statbel). We also give a margin of error. This only corrects part of the distortion.
• We count young people aged 13 to 17 separately.

Who uses our figures?

At the moment we do not give or sell our figures to anyone. Everyone sees the same public totals on the site, and political parties never get more than that.