Free Votes in the House of Commons, 1979-1997

The main aims of this research project were:<br> to generate a complete set of data of all incidents of intra-party dissension in the division lobbies of the House of Commons in the parliaments of 1979 to 1992 inclusively;<br> to identify and research the reasons for dissension in the Common's division lobbies and the events leading up to that dissension;<br> to analyse the data in order to identify trends in parliamentary behaviour and to generate and test explanations of that behaviour;<br> to identify and assess the consequences of changes in parliamentary behaviour for Parliament, for public policy, for the party in government, and for the legitimacy of the political system.<br> The data on free votes was a useful by-product of the above aims and objectives.<br> Two other datasets resulting from the same research project, containing dissension votes in the parliaments between 1979 and 1992, and the parliament of 1992-1997, are held at the Archive under SNs 3929 and 4055.