Military Labor Systems, Domestic Politics, and the Battlefield

Research has demonstrated that decisions around military conflict can significantly impact governments’ political survival. One important strand of the extant literature has focused on the impact of military labor systems, with most academic studies distinguishing between two types of systems: conscription, in which citizens are compelled to serve; and market-based enlistment according to which citizens self-select into military service. In this article, we argue that this conceptualization of military labor systems misses substantial theoretical and empirical variation in recruitment of military personnel over time and across cases. We make two contributions. First, we introduce new data that allow us to capture an important and common additional category of military labor acquisition - selective conscription. Second, we use these new data to empirically demonstrate that selective systems afford governments significant opportunities to manipulate how the costs of military conflict are distributed across the population. Specifically, we provide empirical evidence showing that countries with selective conscription are more willing to tolerate battlefield casualties.