Abstract
Previous studies on the determinants of military conscription have found no association between the level of democracy and conscription. This paper argues that the stability of democratic institutions, rather than the current level of democracy, affects the decision to raise a conscript army. We hypothesize that countries with unstable democratic institutions employ military conscription as a mechanism to control the military and to prevent its involvement in a successful coup. By using data on 149 countries for the years 1970 to 2005, we find that countries with long-standing democratic traditions are less likely to use conscription, corroborating our hypothesis. Our results are robust to variations in specifications.
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