Military conscription, external security, and income inequality: The missing link
| Author | Nikitas Konstantinidis |
| Date | 01 April 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629819895595 |
| Published date | 01 April 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2020, Vol.32(2) 312–347
ÓThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629819895595
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Military conscription,
external security, and income
inequality: The missing link
Nikitas Konstantinidis
IE University,School of Global and Pubic Affairs, Madrid, Spain
Abstract
This article seeks to analyze the political economy of military conscription policy and its relation-
ship with a country’s external security environment. National security is modeled as a non-rivalrous
and non-excludable public good, whose production technology consists of either centrally con-
scripted or competitively recruited military labor. Conscription is construed as an implicit discre-
tionary tax on citizens’ labor endowment. Based on this, I propose a simple political economy
model of pure public goods provision financed by two policy instruments: a lump-sum income tax
and a conscription tax. Constraint optimization of a quasi-linear utility function gives rise to three
general classes of preferences: high- and low-skilled citizens will prefer an all-volunteer army, albeit
of different size, whereas medium-skilled citizens will favor positive levels of conscription. These
derived preferences allow me to tease out an explicitrelationship between militarymanpower pro-
curement policy, a country’s level of external threat, and its pre-tax income inequality levels. One
of my keyfindings is that more egalitariancountries are more likely to useconscription as a military
manpower procurement mechanism.
Keywords
Military conscription; national security;public goods; income inequality; conscription tax
1. Introduction
From the citizen armies of Ancient Athens and Rome to the leve
´e en masse of
Napoleonic France and Frederick’s Prussia, history is awash with examples of
Corresponding author:
Nikitas Konstantinidis, IE University, School of Global and PubicAffairs, C/ Pedro de Valdivia 21, Madrid
28006, Spain.
Email: nikitas.konstantinidis@ie.edu
centrally mobilized or otherwise conscripted military manpower. Currently, for all
their diversity in regime types and security contexts, more than half of the world’s
states employ military conscription in one form or another, amongst them major
powers such as China, Russia, and Brazil (Toronto, 2014). In other words, the
intertemporal and cross-sectional variation in state policy with respect to the allo-
cation of military manpower resources by means of either volunteerism (militias),
market incentives (mercenaries or professional soldiers), or military conscription
(citizen soldiers or mass national armies) has proven to be very rich. While in some
notable cases, namely Britain, the US, and other Anglo-Saxon democracies after
both World Wars (Levi, 1996), the transition back to the status quo of full military
professionalization was promptly made once the extenuating circumstances of
heightened security threats ceased to bind, the long-term trend towards professio-
nalization and military downsizing only started to catch up with other Western
democracies such as France, Italy, and Spain after the end of the Cold War
(Haltiner, 1998). The reverse transition towards the adoption of conscription has
also happened sporadically in cases mostly beyond the Euro-Atlantic ‘‘security
community.’’
In political science, scholars have been studying this intertemporal and cross-
sectional variation in the use of military conscription using both quantitative and
qualitative methods. In terms of the determinants of military conscription, most
studies have centered around factors such as democracy and public opinion
(Adam, 2012; Caverley, 2014; Horowitz and Levendusky, 2011), militarization and
security environment (Cohen, 1985), historical path-dependence (Avant, 2000;
Irondelle, 2003), colonial legacy (Asal et al., 2017), and labor market institutions
(Anderson et al., 1996; Cohn and Toronto, 2017). In terms of the effects of military
conscription, a number of empirical studies treat the type of military manpower
system (MMS) as a right-hand-side variable and estimate its relationship with par-
ticular types of foreign and defense policy. Choi and James (2003), for example,
show that countries that draw their military manpower mostly from conscripted
soldiers are more prone to militarized interstate disputes. Evidence for the propen-
sity of conscript armies to engage in belligerent military activity and aggressive for-
eign policy behavior is also presented by Pickering (2011). Finally, Vasquez (2005)
and Horowitz et al. (2011) arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions as to
whether conscription (especially among democratic states) is associated with a
lower number of military combat casualties. All in all, the empirical evidence on
several of the derived hypotheses about the causes and effects of conscription
remains rather mixed and inconclusive, while the theoretical explanations under-
pinning those hypotheses are often proximate or even spurious and acausal.
Among economists, on the other hand, the extantbody of work on the topic and
the corresponding policy debates have been motivated by and large by the transient
historical relevance of major wars. For example, the heightened need for military
personnel and manpower during the Vietnam War, the controversial nature of the
implemented draft, and its eventual abolition in the US in 1973 spawned a growing
body of work by economists interested in normative questions about the allocative
efficiency and equity of conscript versus all-volunteer armies. Focusing on the US
Konstantinidis 313
military, Fisher (1969), Hansen and Weisbrod (1967), Koch and Birchenall (2016),
Oi (1967), and Warner and Asch (1996) analyze the general equilibrium costs and
benefits of different military manpower procurement mechanisms and come out
overarchingly in favor of an all-volunteer force (with Lee and McKenzie, 1992,
being a notable exception). In the economics literature, the centralized institution
of conscription is often viewed as a transient state of affairs that appears after every
‘‘clarion call to arms’’. By contrast, what this article seeks to explain is why this
institution can be politically sticky, albeit in a toned-down form, even during times
of peace.
Analogously to income taxation, the institution of conscription forms one of
the foundational policy bargains of any polity (Levi, 1997). The obligation to com-
mit one’s own private resources (i.e., time and labor) towards the common good
(i.e., national security) is generally predicated on a constitutive social contract of
state–society relations and individual rights in the same way one tacitly consents to
paying taxes for the provision of public goods. Of course, both the collection of
tax revenues and the mobilization of military manpower resources imply that the
state has the Hobbesian coercive power and authority to do so; in other words,
state capacity, rather than democratic consent, is the necessary precondition for
the public extraction of private resources (Besley and Persson, 2008). The increased
level of centralization and wider reach of the modern nation-state have enabled it
to mobilize even heftier resources from its citizens both during times of war and
peace; hence, it becomes all the more pertinent to study the terms of the constitu-
tive bargain of military conscription as a long-term and enduring social contract
(Levi, 1996).
Therefore, the main goal of this article is to examine the positive and normative
properties of the so-called ‘‘conscription tax’’ in a systematic and rigorous way and
thus to propose a parsimonious and pliable political economy framework that can
hone our understanding of both the contemporaneous and intertemporal variation
in military manpower procurement policy. This framework is predicated on a gen-
eral equilibrium analysis of military manpower procurement accounting for both
the demand and supply of military labor as a function of exogenous factors. In the
same way that public economists theorize about the cyclicality of fiscal policy with
respect to the macroeconomic business cycle, I seek to model the relationship
between conscription policy and fluctuations in the security environment, that is,
how the type of military organization is expected to vary across times of peace and
war for exogenously given and slow-changing political economy fundamentals
such as income inequality. For the purposes of this article, high state capacity is
taken as given (plausibly so in cases of countries far along the modernization pro-
cess), which implies that conscription can be costlessly enforced by the central
authorities of a stable (democratic) polity. Moreover, by thinking of military con-
scription and income taxation as substitutable policy instruments towards the
achievement of a desired level of military preparedness (and, by extension, a corre-
sponding type of foreign and defense policy), one can account for the missing link
between changes in the institutions of military manpower procurement and long-
term foreign and defense policy adjustments to shifting geopolitical circumstances.
314 Journal of Theoretical Politics 32(2)
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