Military Culture and Institutional Trust: Evidence
from Conscription Reforms in Europe
Vincenzo Bove University of Warwick
Riccardo Di Leo University of Warwick
Marco Giani King’s College London
Abstract: Does military conscription reduce the distance between the ordinary citizen and the state? Decades after its
abolition, numerous European policy makers from across the political spectrum advocate the reintroduction of conscription
to foster c ivic virtues, despite a lack of empirical evidence in this respect. Leveraging quasi-random variation in conscription
reforms across 15 European countries, we find that cohorts of men drafted just before its abolition display significantly and
substantially lower institutional trust than cohorts of men who were just exempted. At the same time, ending conscription
had no effect on institutional trust among women from comparable cohorts. Results are n either driven by more favorable
attitudes toward the governme nt, nor by educational choices. Instead, this civil–military gap unfolds through the formation
of a homogeneous community with uniform values. We argue that reintroducing a compulsory military service may not
produce the effects anticipated by its advocates.
Verification Materials: The data and materi als required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, pro-
cedures, and analyzes in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Scie nce Dataverse within the
Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WI7WN0.
A
s the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emer-
gence of international terrorism deterritorialized
the military threat from the continent, a major-
ity of European countries replaced obsolete conscripted
armies with highly technological, all-volunteer forces.
Yet, as the debate around the merits of such policy change
seemed settled, a n increasing number of policy makers
from across the political spectrum begun to advocate a
U-turn on military labor policies. Discontinuing univer-
sal military conscription, they claim, has contributed to
widening the distance between the ordinary citizen and
the state. Several French commentators and politicians
have, for example, lamented the loss of the integrative
and didactic function of the service national.“Histori-
cally, military conscription was a mean for the state to
pass on the Nation’s values” claimed French sociolog ist
Sébastien Jakubowski, so that “[…] to end the military
service was to tell young citizens that the Nation doesn’t
need them.”
1
Senior figures in the French socialist party
explicitly included the return of universal conscrip-
tion in their platform for the 2017 party primaries.
2
In the debate that followed, Emmanuel Macron vowed
to reinstitute a “service national universel” during the
2017 presidential campaign, with the specific aim to
promote a sense of civic duty and national unity (Zaret-
sky 2018). Macron’s legislative proposal became law in
2018. In Germany, both mainstream and populist parties
have set off debates on reintroducing conscription to
Vincenzo Bove, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV47AL, United Kingdom
(v.bove@warwick.ac.uk). Riccardo Di Leo, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV47AL, United Kingdom (R.Di-
Leo@warwick.ac.uk). Marco Giani, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
(marco.g iani@kcl.ac.uk).
The authors contr i buted equally to the article and are listed in alphabetical order. We are grateful to Matteo Casiraghi, Jens Olav Dahlgaard,
Carlo Hofer, Anthony King, Christel Koop, Roland Rathelot, Chiara Ruffa, and Ruben Ruiz-Rufino for their helpful feedback on previous
versions of the article. We also thank, for their suggestions, the participants of the CAGE AMES seminar at Warwick and the CompPol
research seminar at KCL. The usual disclaimer applies.
1
Available at: https://bit.ly/3EPyNII.
2
Available at: https://bit.ly/3pUIE9A and https://bit.ly/31X1B38.
American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 00, No. 00, August 2022, Pp. 1–16
© 2022 The Authors. American Journal of Political Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Midwest Political Science
Association. DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12745
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and repro-
duction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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