Drafting restraint: Are military recruitment policies associated with interstate conflict initiation?

Are countries that use conscription more restrained in their use of military force? A common argument holds that military conscription restrains leaders from using force because it increases the political cost of war and distributes them more evenly and broadly across the population. Despite this intuition, empirical evidence to support it is at best inconclusive. This article introduces a novel perspective on the relationship between military recruitment (MR) policies and conflict initiation (CI) by arguing that the military’s size relative to society – its military participation rate (MPR) – is an important and overlooked part of this story. MPR is a more direct measure of the population’s exposure to the costs of war, but high MPR may also increase CI by enhancing military capacity. By incorporating MPR into the analysis of CI, both independently and in interaction with conscription, this article provides a more comprehensive understanding of how MR practices shape CI. It tests these new hypotheses about the relationship between MPR, conscription and CI using a variety of time-series models that cover all country-years from 1816 to 2011. The findings do not support the conventional wisdom, instead revealing that neither conscription nor volunteerism is independently associated with restrained initiation of military conflicts abroad. On the contrary, these recruitment practices are more likely to be associated with an increase in the likelihood of CI. These findings indicate that we should be skeptical of traditional arguments that assume conscription leads to restraint in the use of force, either independently or conditional on MPR. These counterintuitive results underscore the need for additional research on the complex relationship between MR practices, civil–military relations and foreign policy.