Publication

Historically, conscription has been the preferred method of manpower recruitment for democratic and non-democratic regimes alike. Many modern Western democracies have relied on national service to provide their citizens with a sense of solidarity and nationhood, traits that are thought to be essential to the preservation of a healthy democracy. Yet, 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. In order to solve this problem, I take advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the termination of the French national service program to produce unbiased causal analyses of the effect of national service on a range of civic engagement measures.