National Service as Civic Education?∗

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. Implementation of the natural experiment consisted of an original national survey of the last cohort of French citizens to be conscripted and the first cohort that was no longer subject to conscription. The results of the natural experiment indicate that conscription does indeed socialize individuals in a number of important ways. However, the degree to which mandatory national service can be considered a desirable form of civic education depends on the relative normative importance that one assigns to such measures of civic engagement as voting, good will towards others, communal participation, and respect for the rule of law