Military Conscription, Foreign Policy, and Income Inequality: The Missing Link

This paper seeks to analyze the political economy of military conscription policy and its relationship with a countrys foreign policy outlook (hawkish or dovish). National security is modeled as a non-rivalrous and non-excludable public good, whose production technology consists of either centrally conscripted or competitively recruited labor. Conscription is construed as an implicitdiscretionary tax on citizens labor endowment. Based on this, I propose a simple political economy model of pure public goods provision \u85nanced by two policy instruments: a lump-sum income and a conscription tax. Constraint optimization of a quasi-linear utility function subject to labor market clearing and budget balancing gives rise to three general classes of preferences: high and low-skilled citizens will prefer an all-professional army, albeit of di¤erent size, while medium-skilled citizens favor positive levels of conscription. I further tease out the relationship between conscription policy and the level of external threat to a country, its political regime, and its pre-tax inequality levels