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Voting on the Use of Armed Force. Introducing a New Dataset of Parliamentary Deployment Votes in Ten Liberal Democracies

Foreign Policy
Political Parties
Security
Voting
Wolfgang Wagner
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Wolfgang Wagner
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Florian Böller
Flemming Juul Christiansen
University of Roskilde
Fabrizio Coticchia
Università degli Studi di Genova
Daan Fonck
KU Leuven
Anna Herranz-Surrallés
Maastricht Universiteit
Juliet Kaarbo
University of Edinburgh
Michal Onderco
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Falk Ostermann
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Rasmus Brun Pedersen
Aarhus Universitet
Tapio Raunio
Tampere University
Yf Reykers
Maastricht Universiteit
Valerio Vignoli
Università degli Studi di Milano
Don’t Stop at the Water’s Edge. Exploring the Role of Political Parties in Foreign Policy

Abstract

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.