Blood and Treasure, but Mostly Blood: Electoral Accountability and the All-Volunteer Force

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: In the wake of the American military’s transition to an all-volunteer force, scholars and military leaders alike cautioned that the Armed Forces defending the nation would disproportionately draw from the least advantaged and least politically powerful populations. Should that be the case, certain communities would pay higher costs of war while others would be relatively untouched, leaving the president free to command with little public accountability. This thesis adopts an experimental statistical counterfactual approach to examine the geographic casualty distribution across states during the post-9/11 wars had there been a conscripted force employed. The data presented suggest that the conventional logic is partially correct: an all-volunteer force is not egalitarian. It disproportionately burdened certain states—predominantly in the South and Midwest— with higher casualty rates than would have a conscripted force. However, many of the states that shouldered the costs of war under an AVF also carry disproportionate political gravity as electoral swing states. These findings suggest that a President who chooses to use force is more likely to face electoral backlash for his or her decisions under an all-volunteer force than under a conscripted force. This finding runs contrary to the popular contention that a conscripted force is inherently more democratic and will lead to better electoral accountability for use of force.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 26, 2020

Author	Crespo, Elena Isabella
Primary advisor	Schultz, Kenneth

Subject	Center for International Security and Cooperation
Subject	Electoral accountability for war
Subject	use of force
Subject	U.S. politics
Subject	post-9/11 wars
Subject	U.S. Presidents
Subject	All-Volunteer Force
Subject	Conscription
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/yt851vy2522

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred Citation: Crespo, Elena Isabella. (2020). Blood and Treasure, but Mostly Blood: Electoral Accountability and the All-Volunteer Force. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/yt851vy2522

Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, Theses

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