Noon to 1:00 PM EDT
Michael R. Kenwick (Rutgers University)
Whether military experience shapes political behavior is a central puzzle in the study of foreign policy decision-making. Existing theories link military experience with either hawkish or dovish foreign policy preferences. By contrast, we advance a framework that conceptualizes veterans as experts in military affairs. Rather than determining an individual’s political positions about the use of force ex ante, we expect that domain-specific knowledge and social status as an expert will cause veterans to be more resistant to changing their views in response to casualties. We test our argument by computationally analyzing 36,456 Congressional speeches referencing the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (2001-2014). We measure casualty sensitivity by examining whether casualties in constituent communities cause members of Congress to speak more negatively about the conflicts. There is strong evidence of casualty sensitivity among non-veterans but none among veterans. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is no evidence that veterans were more hawkish or dovish than non-veterans in terms of their overall tone.