Who Are the Military Delegates in Myanmar’s 2010–2015 Union Legislature?

Made available in 2012, short biographies of 166 officers permit examination of the sociological profiles of the Burmese military officers seconded to Myanmar’s Union parliament. Data cover the five socio-demographic variables of gender, age, ethnicity, religion and education, as well as the positions that these officers occupied at the time of their secondment to parliament. These data show that, as a group, the initial cohort of military legislators constitutionally appointed to the two houses of Myanmar’s inaugural “post-junta” Union parliament had a younger and relatively better-educated profile than their elected peers. The most senior officers also had had long careers in the bureaucracy of the armed forces and in its training and educational institutions. Yet as a group they proved far less ethnically and religiously diverse than the civilian representatives, as the substantial majority of them were ethnic Bamar and Buddhist.