Files
Abstract
The role that individuals have had in international relations are important in understanding the nature and outcome of military interventions conducted by state powers. This study will focus solely on the state power of the United Kingdom and its House of Commons in the post-Cold War setting. While there has been previous research done on the voting behavior of the political elite of the United States, this study will focus on a greater number of factors like gender, party membership of the Members of Parliament (MPs), as well as the previous military experience of MPs. These factors will be studied to see how they impacted the MPs' voting practices when it came to issues of the use of force by the state. In order to conduct the study, research will be done on all House of Commons sessions and its members since 1991. To investigate the three factors, I will review the voting records of MPs from 1991 to see how they voted, as well as reviewing their biographies and profiles. The voting records and the three factors will be studied together to see if and how they influenced the voting practices of MPs. The primary purpose of the research is to show how focusing on individuals helps to provide a better overall understanding of how and why a military intervention is conducted by a major power and how it is ended.