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Welcome to the Parliamentary Deployment Votes Database and the International Treaty Ratification Votes Database!

  • JUST PUBLISHED: NEW REFERENCE PUBLICATION FOR ITRVD VERSION #1 in Foreign Policy Analysis. See here.
  • NEW REFERENCE PUBLICATION FOR PDVD VERSION #3 published in the Journal of Peace Research. See here.

PDVD and ITRVD serve dual purpose: As scholars of international politics, we are interested in an analysis of deployment votes and treaty ratification votes. By sharing the data we collected, we hope to stimulate further analyses. As citizens of countries that have participated in military missions, we consider the publication of deployment votes to be a contribution to the democratic control of security and defense policy. With our international treaty votes database, we hope to contribute to more transparency as to the dynamics of the politics of international agreements.

Parliamentary Deployment Votes DatabaseInternational Treaty Ratification Database
The Parliamentary Deployment Votes Database (PDVD) collects and shares data on parliamentary votes on the deployment of armed forces since 1990.
Since the end of the Cold War, democracies have been participating in military missions of various kinds, ranging from peacekeeping to war. These deployments have raised questions about their democratic legitimacy and parliamentary control in particular. In many democracies, deployments decisions are the exclusive competence of the government, and parliament is only informed. In a growing number of cases, however, such decisions have been put to a vote in parliament. PDVD documents and analyzes these votes.
At the moment, in version 2 of the dataset, PDVP documents 514 votes in plenaries for the period between August 1990 and December 2017 in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. You can check out our data here.
The International Treaty Ratification Database (ITRVD) collects and shares data on parliamentary-level and party-votes on international agreements since 1990.
According to the World Treaty Index, 75.000 treaties have been negotiated in the 20th century, most of them bilateral agreements. There has been a general trend towards strengthening the role of parliament in external relations, including the realm of treaty ratification. Hence, treaty ratification has become subject to politicization and party politics. States differ widely, however, in the procedures of domestic scrutiny of international agreements and the degree of formal or informal involvement of parliament and parties.
The ITRVD project has gathered data on the parliamentary scrutiny of international agreements in the Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the USA. You can check out our data here.