Peer-Reviewed Articles
- Max Z. Margulies, "Patrons and Personnel: The Foreign Determinants of Military Recruitment Policies," Security Studies 33, no. 3 (2021): 354-384.
- Max Z. Margulies and Leah E. Foodman, "Suboptimal Selective Service: An Analysis of the Obstacles to Selective Service Reform in American Political Institutions," Journal of Strategic Security 14, no. 2 (2021): 74-88.
Work in Progress
Divided Loyalty: Are Conscript Militaries Less Likely to Repress Protesters?
Authors: Paul Johnson and Max Margulies
Abstract:
Are conscript militaries less likely to crack down violently on protests than volunteer militaries, or compared to other security forces like police? Conscript armies are generally thought to be more representative of the population and therefore to identify with protesters as opposed to the regime. While intuitive and appealing, this argument has rarely been tested. We use event-level data from the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) dataset to identify more than 40,000 protests in 174 countries between 1995 and 2013, which we use to provide the first large-n test of the common assumption that conscript armies are less likely to use violence against protesters. In addition, we account for the reality that conscription does not always produce representative armies. Our findings indicate that conscription is only associated with a decreased use of repression as the size of the military relative to the population increases. In supplemental analyses, we also examine the regime’s strategic choice of which force to deploy, military or police, in response to an antigovernment protest.
Drafting Restraint: Are All-Volunteer Forces More Likely to Go to War than Conscript Armies?
Author: Max Margulies
Abstract:
Are countries that use conscription more restrained in their use of military force? A military draft distributes the costs of war across the population, creating an engaged citizenry with “skin in the game” that will restrain foreign adventurism. Despite this intuition, existing evidence is inconclusive. Empirical efforts to test this hypothesis find support when they focus on the effects of conscription on public support for war, but the few cross-national large-n analyses on this topic do not find that conscription makes countries more peaceful. I contribute to this debate by demonstrating that scholars and practitioners have failed to understand the contingent effects of conscription. I argue that not all conscript armies are created equal: whether conscription restrains policymakers depends on regime type and the military’s size. Without democratic institutions or large conscript militaries, conscription does not create enough accountability to limit leaders’ war-making intentions. Through time-series analysis of several large-n datasets of different types of interstate conflicts, I find that conscription only prevents foreign adventurism under a narrow set of circumstances. These findings have important implications for the future of civil-military relations and great power conflict, especially as policymakers reexamine the future of American military service and the All-Volunteer Force.
Imagining Regime Security: The Role of Ideology in Mediating Security Force Design
Author: Drew Kinney and Max Margulies
Abstract:
Governments often face a tradeoff when building their military between prioritizing security against internal and external threats. How does this threat calculus affect a government’s strategy for recruiting personnel into its military? A growing literature argues that domestic political threats have major implications for military design and behavior, but state officials adopt different recruitment strategies to address similar threats. While some regimes use ethnic recruiting to rely on a narrow but loyal segment of the population, others try to broaden their support through broader, representative recruitment. We argue that whether states rely on ethnic or broad-based recruitment cannot simply be reduced to an evaluation of their perceived threat environment or domestic culture. Instead, leaders’ ideologies play an important role in mediating the relationship between threat perception and military recruitment. When leaders adopt ideologies that emphasize republican notions of citizenship, they are more likely to perceive the military as an appropriate and effective vehicle for nation-building, and thus will pursue a broad-based recruitment policy. We draw on archival materials to examine competing hypotheses about the relationship between ideology, threat, and military recruitment over several decades of Iraq's post-independence history. Our findings underscore the importance of individual and party-level factors in statebuilding and the challenges of inferring clear patterns of military organization from threat assessments.
Call of Duty? Testing whether perceptions of volunteerism affect the public’s support for the use of force abroad
Authors: Max Margulies and Keith L. Carter
Abstract:
The United States has increasingly relied on special forces—as opposed to larger footprint regular deployments—as its preferred solution to foreign security problems. Scholars have offered several rational explanations for this shift in the how the United States uses military force abroad, including special forces’ perceived expertise, their more covert nature, and a desire to insulate the public from the costs of war. We argue for a more ideational explanation for the apparent high level of support for special forces deployments: members of the public are more likely to support the use of force when they perceive that deployed soldiers have volunteered for the mission. In other words, the public believes that special forces are a more appropriate military tool because these soldiers “know what they’re getting into” and consciously chose a career with high exposure to combat. We employ an original survey experiment that allows us to isolate the treatment effect of “volunteerism” on the public’s support for a hypothetical but realistic military deployment. In this way, we contribute to the literature on military recruitment and support for war by emphasizing the importance of ideational factors over rational cost-benefit analysis as an explanation for how states use force.
Divided Loyalty: Are Conscript Militaries Less Likely to Repress Protesters?
Authors: Paul Johnson and Max Margulies
Abstract:
Are conscript militaries less likely to crack down violently on protests than volunteer militaries, or compared to other security forces like police? Conscript armies are generally thought to be more representative of the population and therefore to identify with protesters as opposed to the regime. While intuitive and appealing, this argument has rarely been tested. We use event-level data from the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) dataset to identify more than 40,000 protests in 174 countries between 1995 and 2013, which we use to provide the first large-n test of the common assumption that conscript armies are less likely to use violence against protesters. In addition, we account for the reality that conscription does not always produce representative armies. Our findings indicate that conscription is only associated with a decreased use of repression as the size of the military relative to the population increases. In supplemental analyses, we also examine the regime’s strategic choice of which force to deploy, military or police, in response to an antigovernment protest.
Drafting Restraint: Are All-Volunteer Forces More Likely to Go to War than Conscript Armies?
Author: Max Margulies
Abstract:
Are countries that use conscription more restrained in their use of military force? A military draft distributes the costs of war across the population, creating an engaged citizenry with “skin in the game” that will restrain foreign adventurism. Despite this intuition, existing evidence is inconclusive. Empirical efforts to test this hypothesis find support when they focus on the effects of conscription on public support for war, but the few cross-national large-n analyses on this topic do not find that conscription makes countries more peaceful. I contribute to this debate by demonstrating that scholars and practitioners have failed to understand the contingent effects of conscription. I argue that not all conscript armies are created equal: whether conscription restrains policymakers depends on regime type and the military’s size. Without democratic institutions or large conscript militaries, conscription does not create enough accountability to limit leaders’ war-making intentions. Through time-series analysis of several large-n datasets of different types of interstate conflicts, I find that conscription only prevents foreign adventurism under a narrow set of circumstances. These findings have important implications for the future of civil-military relations and great power conflict, especially as policymakers reexamine the future of American military service and the All-Volunteer Force.
Imagining Regime Security: The Role of Ideology in Mediating Security Force Design
Author: Drew Kinney and Max Margulies
Abstract:
Governments often face a tradeoff when building their military between prioritizing security against internal and external threats. How does this threat calculus affect a government’s strategy for recruiting personnel into its military? A growing literature argues that domestic political threats have major implications for military design and behavior, but state officials adopt different recruitment strategies to address similar threats. While some regimes use ethnic recruiting to rely on a narrow but loyal segment of the population, others try to broaden their support through broader, representative recruitment. We argue that whether states rely on ethnic or broad-based recruitment cannot simply be reduced to an evaluation of their perceived threat environment or domestic culture. Instead, leaders’ ideologies play an important role in mediating the relationship between threat perception and military recruitment. When leaders adopt ideologies that emphasize republican notions of citizenship, they are more likely to perceive the military as an appropriate and effective vehicle for nation-building, and thus will pursue a broad-based recruitment policy. We draw on archival materials to examine competing hypotheses about the relationship between ideology, threat, and military recruitment over several decades of Iraq's post-independence history. Our findings underscore the importance of individual and party-level factors in statebuilding and the challenges of inferring clear patterns of military organization from threat assessments.
Call of Duty? Testing whether perceptions of volunteerism affect the public’s support for the use of force abroad
Authors: Max Margulies and Keith L. Carter
Abstract:
The United States has increasingly relied on special forces—as opposed to larger footprint regular deployments—as its preferred solution to foreign security problems. Scholars have offered several rational explanations for this shift in the how the United States uses military force abroad, including special forces’ perceived expertise, their more covert nature, and a desire to insulate the public from the costs of war. We argue for a more ideational explanation for the apparent high level of support for special forces deployments: members of the public are more likely to support the use of force when they perceive that deployed soldiers have volunteered for the mission. In other words, the public believes that special forces are a more appropriate military tool because these soldiers “know what they’re getting into” and consciously chose a career with high exposure to combat. We employ an original survey experiment that allows us to isolate the treatment effect of “volunteerism” on the public’s support for a hypothetical but realistic military deployment. In this way, we contribute to the literature on military recruitment and support for war by emphasizing the importance of ideational factors over rational cost-benefit analysis as an explanation for how states use force.