I Want You! The Determinants of Military Conscription

What explains the use of military conscription? Using a new dataset of more than 100 countries over a period of 200 years, we examine the determinants of a state’s decision to implement a military draft. We argue that the decision to use conscription is largely dependent on historical factors. Specifically, we contend that former British colonies are less likely to use conscription as a means of military recruitment because of an anti-conscription precedent set during the English Civil War. We find that former British colonies are far less likely to opt for conscription, even after controlling for counter arguments relating to a state’s colonial legacy. We also examine a number of existing explanations for the use of conscripts, using the data to arbitrate previous debates. We find that democracies are less likely to implement the draft, while states involved in an interstate war or interstate rivalry are more likely to do so. Word count: Approx. 10,800 words Determinants of Military Conscription 3 Why do some states conscript their soldiers, while others recruit volunteers to fight in the military? This question is central to understanding how the state relates to society, and it has produced a wealth of literature (Cohen 1985; Levi 1997; Haltiner 1998; Avant 2000; Irondelle 2003; Leander 2004; Mulligan and Shleifer 2005; Vasquez 2005; Edmunds 2006; Gilroy and Williams 2006). Even in states where volunteer military recruitment is firmly entrenched, such as the United States, merely mentioning the draft is likely to stir up vociferous debate (Morris 1982; Lee and McKenzie 1992; Rangel 2003; Caverley 2010). To our knowledge, however, no long-term, cross-national analysis of the determinants of conscription has been conducted. This has made it impossible to examine important changes in conscription in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the rise of the mass army during the French Revolutionary period and during the World Wars (Nickerson 1942), to the decline in conscription since then (Horeman and