  The parton densities of the proton are of fundamental importance not only for
our description of hadronic and nuclear structure, but also for reliable
predictions for new heavy particle searches at colliders. At the large partonic
momentum fractions required for the production of these particles, the parton
distribution functions, in particular the one of the gluon, are unfortunately
still badly constrained. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to
improve on their determination with new data coming from electroweak vector
boson production at large transverse momenta at the LHC with center-of-mass
energies of 7, 8 or 14 TeV. We demonstrate that this process is dominated by
quark-gluon scattering, that theoretical predictions can be reliably made on
the basis of next-to-leading order perturbation theory and its resummation, and
that these data should thus be used in global fits. We also point out that the
non-perturbative parameters determined from Tevatron run-1 Z-boson data at low
p_T describe very well the new LHC data at \sqrt{s}=7 TeV.
