I Want You! The Determinants of Military Conscription

Asal, Victor; Conrad, Justin; Toronto, Nathan W.

doi:10.1177/0022002715606217

Cited by 46 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…That said, given the global trend toward volunteer military recruitment, we judged it more important to control for the effects of time as opposed to country effects. So, following Carter and Signorino (2010) and Asal, Conrad, and Toronto (2015), we used robust standard errors clustered on country code and year count, squared-year count, and cubed-year count variables to control for time dependence in the logit regressions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Legal origins do not vary over time, and do not provide a mechanism that could interact with, for example, threat level, to explain change. An economic mechanism can do so, because it involves a cost-benefit calculation that includes both those factors that change over time and those that do not (see also Asal, Conrad, & Toronto, 2015).…”

Section: Labor Market Regulation Versus Legal Originmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Markets and Manpower

Cohn

Toronto

2016

Armed Forces & Society

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Economic studies of military manpower systems emphasize the advantages of voluntarism under all but the most total threats, but this explains neither the persistence of institutionalized conscription in many states nor the timing of shifts from such conscription systems to volunteer militaries. Traditional explanations focus on external threat levels, but this has also proven unsatisfying. We theorize that threat variables establish the state’s baseline need for manpower, but structural economic variables determine whether the necessary manpower can be more efficiently obtained by conscription or voluntarism. Using a new data set of 99 countries over 40 years, we find that states with British origins are less likely and those experiencing greater external threat are more likely to employ conscripts. Most importantly, states with more highly regulated labor markets are more likely to employ conscripts, which suggests that, controlling for a number of relevant factors, labor markets matter in military manpower decisions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Labor Market Regulation Versus Legal Originmentioning

confidence: 99%

Markets and Manpower

Cohn

Toronto

2016

Armed Forces & Society

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“…By separating legislative activity from good-faith efforts at compliance, we hope to minimize the potential selection effects of IHL. Finally, we account for recruitment practices using conscription data from Asal, Conrad, and Toronto (2017), updated through 2010.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blue Helmets, Red Flags: Institutional, Societal, and Military Determinants of Peacekeeping Abuses

Rodriguez

Kinne

2019

International Studies Quarterly

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United Nations peacekeeping soldiers commit atrocities while deployed despite their mandate to protect civilians from harm. Yet, there is tremendous variation across missions in reported human rights abuses. Why are some missions more susceptible to misconduct than others? To answer this puzzle, we identify three broad sources of influence on peacekeeper behavior: institutions, society, and military culture. Using newly collected data, we find that host-country and contributing-country institutions, particularly press freedoms and rule of law, dramatically decrease violations. Compliance with international humanitarian law also decreases violations, though to a lesser degree than institutions. Societal influences, such as gender norms and income inequality, have virtually no impact on abuses. We illustrate the utility of these findings by generating out-of-sample predictions for hypothetical peacekeeping missions in countries with recent political turmoil.

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“…While many scholars have examined the differences between volunteer and conscripted militaries (Annaka et al 2019;Asal, Conrad, and Toronto 2017;James 2003, 2008;Cohn and Toronto 2017;Margulies 2018;Pickering 2011), ours is the first to identify the critical distinction between universal and selective conscription. We show that the latter is unique in allowing politicians to shield politically valuable constituencies from battlefield deaths, which generates military strategies that are less constrained by domestic politics than under alternative conscription systems.…”

mentioning

confidence: 88%

Conscription Systems, Political Survival, and Battlefield Deaths

Atkinson¹,

Fahey²,

Lindstädt³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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How do countries’ conscription systems affect their ability to fight wars? Scholars have devoted significant attention to understanding how domestic political concerns influence military strategy, but we do not yet know how these concerns are shaped by military labor policies. We argue that conscription systems determine how the human costs of war are distributed throughout society, and in turn, the government’s tolerance for battlefield casualties in pursuit of victory. Using new data on every country’s conscription policy from 1800 to the present, we demonstrate that countries with selective conscription experience more casualties than those with universal conscription or volunteer militaries. To examine the mechanism we theorize, we then conduct an in-depth case study of the United States’ experience during the Vietnam War. Using adifference-in-differences design and new data on all American deaths in Vietnam, we show that changes in county death rates after the introduction of the lottery reflect electoral considerations.

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I Want You! The Determinants of Military Conscription

Cited by 46 publications

References 71 publications

Markets and Manpower

Markets and Manpower

Blue Helmets, Red Flags: Institutional, Societal, and Military Determinants of Peacekeeping Abuses

Conscription Systems, Political Survival, and Battlefield Deaths

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