https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1789-646X
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ABSTRACT
How does conscription influence citizens’ support for the armed forces? We argue that conscription, more so than voluntary-recruitment systems, can reach out to and socialize larger segments of the society in line with the military’s values. This, in turn, induces more positive views of the armed forces. Using a unique data set comprising information for 34 European states in 1997–2017, we find robust evidence that countries with conscription-based recruitment tend to be characterized by higher levels of support for the military. This result greatly adds to the debate about the type of military-recruitment system countries should implement: abolishing compulsory military service is usually seen as increasing efficiency and performance; yet, a positive – and previously unknown – externality of conscription that we identify is a higher degree of support by the public, which is pivotal for, inter alia, defense-policy implementation, military interventions abroad, budget considerations, or the participation in military alliances.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Compulsory service distorts the allocation of resources inside the military due to the oversupply of cheap unskilled labor (Hansen and Weisbrod Citation1967). In addition, conscription is supposed to lead to an economic output loss due to misallocation of resources (Poutvaara and Wagener Citation2007a, Citation2007b; Warner and Asch Citation2001, 172–173). However, there are also counterarguments. Consider, for example, minority groups such as the Druze population in Israel. Conscription has a positive effect on future earnings of Druze men as a result of networking that conscription allows for (Asali Citation2019).
2. See online at: https://www.dw.com/en/germans-debate-return-of-military-conscription-and-service-for-men-and-women/a-44962067.
3. Socialization is defined as the ‘process of inducting actors into the norms and rules of a given community’ (Checkel Citation2005, 804). The ‘community’ in our case is the military. Norms or values are defined as ‘standard[s] of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity’ (Finnemore and Sikkink Citation1998, 891).
4. Discussing conscription in the Soviet Union, Eichler (Citation2012, 21) denotes that the primary function of military service was ‘that of educator and socializer […] a key tool in the proper ideological socialization of Soviet men.’
5. For instance, in pre-1967 Greece, service in the armed forces was dominated by the ‘pallikari-leventis-philotimo self-image syndrome’ of social and cultural origin, which declared the high levels of moral virtue and code of honor surrounding service men (Kourvetaris Citation1971, 1046).
6. Or ‘Staatsbürger in Uniform’ as the guiding principle of the German Armed Forces as developed during the time of conscription.
7. Finally, there is a likely self-selection effect given only for all-voluntary forces: individuals choose to enroll, potentially as they already identify with the military, its values, and ethos. Self-selection is not a theoretical or an empirical issue in the case of conscription, however, where individuals are drafted by the state authorities.
8. Available online at: https://zacat.gesis.org/webview/index.jsp. Note that Iceland is part of our sample, but does not maintain a standing army. Omitting this country from our analysis does not alter the substance of our findings, however.
9. For instance, the military is more embedded in some states, while others could have an ex-ante lower level of support for the armed forces due to, e.g. historical reasons. To illustrate this, consider the trust in the armed forces, which is at around 86 percent in the UK on average, but only at around 77.5 percent in Germany (the difference is statistically significant with t=5.0428, p=0.000).
10. Moreover, according to the codebook of Toronto (Citation2017), ‘[s]tates that allow for conscientious objection can still be considered to use conscription as the method of recruitment, as long as conscription is the principal means of satisfying the military manpower requirement. States that use a selective service system (e.g. a non-universal draft that distinguishes inductees from non-inductees based on economic necessity) are considered to use conscription as the method of recruitment as long as the military manpower requirement is still typically satisfied via the draft. Conscription is considered the principal means for satisfying the military manpower requirement as long as a nontrivial number of recruits are enlisted through force.’
11. We only consider this variable when constraining the sample to countries that actually changed their recruitment system at some point in Toronto (Citation2017). States that always had a volunteer system in place during the sample period are omitted from analyses that rely on our second core explanatory variable. This approach helps us to exploit more thoroughly variation in conscription as we not only examine changes between states, but also within. The descriptive statistics provided are based on the constrained sample.
12. Employing the level of GDP or GDP per capita instead produces virtually identical results. We prefer to focus on unemployment, though, as this information seems more visible and understandable to the general public.