This paper introduces a new dataset on parliamentary deployment votes in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the USA. Since the end of the Cold War, parliaments in these countries voted ca. 250 times on government proposals to use military force. We collected data on a) the degree of contestation in the entire parliament for each vote, making use of the “agreement index” that has been used in studies of party group cohesion in the European Parliament; b) the degree of support per party family for each vote and, c) the average level of support per party family per legislative term. The paper provides descriptive statistics showing a) that military missions have been contested in liberal democracies along a left/right axis in a curvilinear way and b) that levels of contestation in parliament differ significantly across countries.
