Out of the Service, Into the House

Abstract

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.

Would You Like to Know More? Selection, Socialization, and the Political Attitudes of Military Veterans

“…The chief exception has been for elites, in the realm of foreign policy. Here, Gelpi and Feaver find that legislatures with a higher proportion of veterans are associated with greater selectivity in the use of force (Gelpi and Feaver 2002; Feaver and Gelpi 2004), while Lupton shows that veterans in Congress vote to increase oversight in wartime (Lupton 2017) but are otherwise less likely to vote for restrictions on the military than their non-veteran counterparts (Lupton 2022).…”

“…of veterans of the all-volunteer U.S. military suggestscontrary to the findings of studies that concentrated on draft-era veterans (e.g., Johnson 1976) or political elites (e.g., Feaver and Gelpi 2004;Lupton 2017;Robinson et al 2020)-that, among the mass public, military service is generally associated with more conservative and more hawkish political views, and a propensity to vote for Republicans (see, for example, Bishin and Incantalupo 2008;Klingler and Chatagnier 2013). However, the data in these recent studies are insufficient to determine how veteran status affects attitudes and behavior.…”

“Twice the Citizen”: How Military Attitudes of Superiority Undermine Civilian Control in the United States

“…We argue that military officers' attitudes of superiority matter because they affect their confidence in civilian leaders of the military-that is, the president, Secretary of Defense and political appointees in policymaking or oversight roles who have held primary careers in non-military fields, such as law, business, politics, academia, and diplomacy. Because few politicians are veterans (Lupton 2017) and even fewer have held long careers in the services, instead maintaining long careers in the civilian sectors, political leaders as a general class are likely to be identified with the values held by society at large and not with those of the military. 4 Attitudes of superiority toward society therefore lay the groundwork for skepticism and disparagement of the civilian leaders who represent and reflect that society.…”

Talking War: Representation, Veterans and Ideology in Post-War Parliamentary Debates

“…These expected differences between veteran and non-veteran MPs therefore also need to be observed through the prism of political competition. In the US context, for example, veterans are more likely to be Republican than are non-veterans of comparable ages (Newport 2009); defence policy is made in a highly partisan context (Swers 2007) and party affiliation has a substantive effect on the behaviour of both voters and legislators concerning the issues of foreign policy, defence and war oversight (Bianco 2005;Carsey and Rundquist 1999;Lindsay 1990;Lupton 2017). In the context of post-war Croatia, communities' wartime pasts have been shown to be the most significant determinants of electoral results (Glaurdić and Vuković 2016); war veterans have been shown to be more likely to vote for nationalist parties, though crucially only if they did not suffer from war-related trauma (Lesschaeve 2020); political entrepreneurs have been shown to engage in continued politicization of war memories (Gödl 2007;Sokolić 2019) and political parties have been shown to have vastly different welfare policies related to war-affected populations, grounded in part in their different connections with war veterans' associations (Dolenec 2017;Fisher 2005).…”