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While evidence from international security and civil-military relations shows that elites with military experience have distinct policy preferences from elites who have not served in the armed forces, the effects of military service are not apparent in congressional voting records on foreign and defense policy. If elites with military experience have distinct policy preferences, why has this gap failed to manifest itself in congressional policy positions? I argue that the effects of military service are most pronounced on issues where this experience is highly salient: on the oversight of war operations. Using a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of an index of roll call votes in the House of Representatives during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I find that congresspersons with military experience are significantly more likely to vote to increase congressional oversight over war operations, including increased access to information and limiting the deployment of troops in theater. Further tests confirm these findings are not simply due to partisan effects. I discuss how my results carry serious implications for war termination and the declining number of veterans in Congress during the post-9/11 era, as well as the impact of military service on foreign policy and international security.

Scholars across international relations (IR) debate the role military experience plays in elite decision-making. I argue there are two critical problems with this debate. First, it fails to adequately consider the underlying mechanisms linking military service to elite policy preferences. Second, it narrowly focuses on the use of force and largely ignores other ways in which military experience may shape elite behavior. I employ vulnerability to the Vietnam draft lottery to disentangle the impact of two key mechanisms linking military service to elite preferences: self-selection and socialization. I compare the foreign and defense policy roll call votes of Members of Congress (MCs) in the House of Representatives across the 94th–113th Congresses who were eligible for the draft and served in the military to those who were eligible for the draft but did not serve. I find significant differences in the roll call voting behavior between these groups, particularly on issues associated with arming and defense budget restrictions, as well as broader oversight of the military. These effects are heightened for MCs who served on active duty, in the military longer, and in combat, providing strong support for socialization effects. My study carries implications for civil–military relations, elite decision-making, and the study of leaders in IR.

Are student subject experiment pools comparable across institutions? Despite repeated concerns over the “college sophomore problem,” many experiment-based studies still rely on student subject pools due to their convenience and accessibility. In this paper, I investigate whether student subject pools are comparable across universities by examining how respondents across three student subject pools at distinct educational institutions perform on the same survey experiment about crisis bargaining between states. I argue that, due to selection biases inherent in university matriculation and the self-selection of students into experimental protocols, respondents across these subject pools will exhibit key demographic differences. I also examine whether respondents across these subject pools think similarly about international politics and respond comparably to experimental treatments. I find that, while there are significant demographic differences across subject pools, subjects across institutions respond similarly to experimental treatments—with the key exception of information regarding the regime type of a state. Furthermore, there is little evidence that these demographic differences impact conditional average treatment effects across subgroups. These findings carry critical implications for the use of student samples across political science and within international relations more specifically, particularly regarding the current replication crisis in the discipline.