Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The main aims of this research project were:
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;
to identify and research the reasons for dissension in the Common's division lobbies and the events leading up to that dissension;
to analyse the data in order to identify trends in parliamentary behaviour and to generate and test explanations of that behaviour;
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.
The data on free votes was a useful by-product of the above aims and objectives.
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.
Main Topics:

This dataset records the occasions on which MPs from the two main British political parties (Conservatives and Labour) cast 'free' votes between 1979 and 1997. Each dataset covers one of the four parliaments of 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992.
The dataset also contains additional data about the socio-economic and political backgrounds of each MP, covering their age, former occupation, education, political experience and gender, as well as their electoral situation.