Parliamentary Deployment Votes Data

Our data are freely available to scholars and a broader public interested in how political parties vote on military missions. Our aim is to extend the dataset to include additional countries and to update the dataset regularly.

We also provide some visualization options to get a better grasp of the data. Please see the bullet points in the most recent dataset version below.

Version 3

Version 3 of the database (V3, July 2021) contains data on 1,022 votes in plenaries and 5,540 party votes for the period between August 1990 and December 2019 in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The data consists of two separate datasets, one on parliamentary-level votes (PDVD_v3_votes) and one on party votes (PDVD_v3_party-votes) with accompanying documentation.

In version 3, we provide the following files:

When using the datasets, please cite as follows:
Ostermann, Falk, Cornelia Baciu, Florian Böller, Dario Čepo, Flemming J. Christiansen, Fabrizio Coticchia, Daan Fonck, Anna Herranz-Surrallés, Juliet Kaarbo, Joo Hee Kim, Kryštof Kučmáš, Philippe Lagassé, Benjamin Martill, Kenneth McDonagh, Michal Onderco, Rasmus B. Pedersen, Tapio Raunio, Yf Reykers, Richard Sonneveld, Michal Smetana, Atsushi Tago, Özlem Terzi, Sigita Trainauskiene, Valerio Vignoli, Wolfgang Wagner (2021): Parliamentary Deployment Votes Database, Version 3. Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LHYQFM.

Version 2(b)

  • >>> Please access our visualization tool for pdvd votes v2 here (opens in a new window). <<<

Version #2 of the dataset (first published in May 2019, with votes included until December 2017; with slight corrections* in the party_vote file version #2b in November 2019) now covers 11 countries (Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States of America).

(* The changes are the following: The name of the Czech party TOP09 was misspelled in some lines. 10 votes of the Danish Centre Democrats (CD) were accidentally doubled and have been removed.)

In version 2b, we provide the following files:

When using this version, please cite the following:
Ostermann, Falk, Florian Böller, Flemming J. Christiansen, Fabrizio Coticchia, Daan Fonck, Anna Herranz-Surrallés, Juliet Kaarbo, Krystof Kucmas, Michal Onderco, Rasmus B. Pedersen, Tapio Raunio, Yf Reykers, Michal Smetana and Valerio Vignoli, and Wolfgang Wagner (2020). “Constructing a Parliamentary Deployment Votes Database: Challenges of Data Collection, Classification, and Indexing”. In Research Methods in Defence Studies. A Multidisciplinary Overview. Edited by Delphine Deschaux-Dutard. London and New York: Routledge, 170-188.

  • See a pre-print here.

Version 1

Version 1 of the dataset covers 4 countries (France, Germany, Spain, UK). It comes in the following files:

When using this version, please cite the following:
Wolfgang Wagner, Anna Herranz-Surrallés, Juliet Kaarbo, and Falk Ostermann (forthcoming). ‘Party politics at the water’s edge: Contestation of military operations in Europe.’ European Political Science Review 10:4, 537-563. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755773918000097.