Abstract
Nearly all studies that seek to uncover the effects of military service on the individual are plagued with the self-selection bias that comes with studying the all-volunteer force. To solve this problem, this paper takes advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the suspension of the French National Service program to produce unbiased causal analyses of the effect of national service on a range of civic engagement measures. Results generated using Instrumental Variables estimation indicate that there is little difference in individual-level civic engagement between service participants and their non-serving peers. However, when potential mediators are taken into account, the ensuing results imply that the substantial increase in the likelihood of having children associated with national service participation has a suppressive effect on service participants’ overall level of civic engagement.
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The “long civic generation” refers to those who came of age during the shared sacrifice of the Great Depression and WWII (Putnam 2000).
For a discussion on the discourse surrounding the suspension of the draft and the move to an all-volunteer force see Cowen (2006).
The challenge for research attempting to evaluate the effects of a service program on the individual is to find a way to collect experimental data on service participants. While this problem poses significant difficulties, a handful of studies have been able to exploit service selection rules that produce natural experiments where service participation is as good as randomly assigned (Angrist 1990; Angrist and Krueger 1994; Imbens and van der Klaauw 1995; Angrist and Chen 2011). This literature is not extensively reviewed here because it is not concerned with civic engagement, but the effect of military service on socioeconomic achievement over the life course.
See MacLean and Elder (2007) for an extensive review of the literature on the relationship between military service and the life course that focuses on criminal careers, marital status, lifelong health, and socioeconomic attainment.
Examples of Western Democracies that recently ended conscription: Netherlands, 1996; France, 1997; Spain, 2001; Portugal, 2004; Hungary, 2004; Italy, 2005; Slovak Republic, 2006; and Germany, 2011.
For an overview of public opinion regarding French National Service before the suspension see Thieblemont (1996, 1997). For arguments concerning the suspension of conscription in France see Boene (2003), Irondelle (2003), and Lecomte (2006). For the official view of the French defense community see Livre Blank (1994).
These figures vary from year to year. In 1998, 54.7 % served in the Army, 10.6 % in the Air Force, 8.8 % in the Navy, 7.2 % in the Gendarmerie, 2.1 % in the Medical Corps, and 16.9 % in the civilian forms of service. For the sample, 55.36 % served in the Army, 11.16 in the Air Force, 8.58 % in the Navy, 15.88 % in the Gendarmerie, and 8.01 % in the civilian forms of service. It must be noted that conscripts in the sample could have served any time between 1996 and 2001.
While conscripts did not received additional educational or training benefits on completion of their service period, conscripts who served in positions such as military/auxiliary police or firefighters were often able to translate their service experience into a post-service job.
Survey data used in this study were collected by GFK Custom Research France in November of 2008 and consist of 1500 randomly selected respondents from a stratified sample of the target population (French male citizens born in 1978 and 1979), 750 in each age cohort with a response rate of 80 %. The sampling frame was taken from an address file of men born in the target years and was stratified regionally and on socio-demographic criteria such as income, number of children, and education. The survey instrument was presented as a study about civic engagement and the high response rate is attributed to the respondents’ general interest in the topic. National service participants in the sample could have served any time between 1996 and 2001, which means the survey instrument would have been implemented between 12 and 7 years after service participation.
Many of these questions have been adapted from the European Social Survey and Grootaert et al. (2004).
In addition to the possible responses listed below, respondents were allowed to not answer, refuse to answer, or simply respond with “don’t know” for all questions across all measures.
Putnam (2000) argues that there are four main factors that lead to the decline of civic engagement: generational change, amount of time spent watching television, suburbanization/sprawl, and increased work intensity (both commute time and proximity of job location are covered under suburbanization/sprawl). Generational change is not relevant to this study because the data are constrained to individuals from two sequential birth years.
See the Online Appendix for further discussion about the estimation of mediation effects with this data set.
A brief explanation of the IV identification assumptions is in order. The first assumption, z i is correlated with s i , states that there exists a first stage relationship between year of birth and probability of service (see Table 2). The independence assumption, z i is uncorrelated with ε i , states that the instrument is a good as randomly assigned. In the case under consideration, the independence assumption holds so long as the DOB cutoff was not determined by some reason related to inherent characteristics of the 1979 cohort. The exclusion restriction, z i affects Y i only through s i , holds so long as French men born in 1978 do not differ from French men born in 1979 in some other way than having an increased probability of being conscripted. Pre-treatment variables to test for inherent differences across birth year were not collected, but given the nature of the discontinuity and composition of the target population there is no reason to expect a violation of the exclusion restriction. Finally, the monotonicity assumption, z i only affects s i in one direction, is satisfied as long as the probability of being conscripted is always higher for men born in 1978 than men born in 1979 (see Fig. 1). For a more detailed explanation of the IV identification assumptions see Angrist and Pischke (2009).
F Statistics represent the strength of the relationship between the instrument and the dependent variable in the first stage. F Statistics above 10 generally indicate strong instruments (Staiger and Stock 1997).
These results are significant at the 0.10 level.
This result is significant at the 0.05 level.
This result is significant at the 0.10 level.
This result is significant at the 0.10 level.
This result is significant at the 0.01 level.
As of 2012, France was found to rank 11th out of 15 Western European countries in terms of societal civic engagement (Ferragina 2012, p. 74).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Donald Green, Paul Bracken, Frances Rosenbluth, Joel Middleton, Gharad Bryan, Ryan Sheely, participants in Yale University’s Leitner Political Economy Seminar, editors Jeffery Mondak and Thomas Rudolph, and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. I am grateful for financial support from Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale. A previous version of this paper was presented at the April 2012 meeting of the Midwestern Political Science Association. The data set used in this paper is available through the Yale ISPS Data Archive.
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Garcia, R.J.B. National Service and Civic Engagement: A Natural Experiment. Polit Behav 37, 845–864 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-014-9293-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-014-9293-1