Are countries that use conscription more restrained in their use of military force? A common argument holds that military conscription restrains leaders from using force because it increases the political cost of war and distributes them more evenly and broadly across the population. Despite this intuition, empirical evidence to support it is at best inconclusive. This article introduces a novel perspective on the relationship between military recruitment (MR) policies and conflict initiation (CI) by arguing that the military’s size relative to society – its military participation rate (MPR) – is an important and overlooked part of this story. MPR is a more direct measure of the population’s exposure to the costs of war, but high MPR may also increase CI by enhancing military capacity. By incorporating MPR into the analysis of CI, both independently and in interaction with conscription, this article provides a more comprehensive understanding of how MR practices shape CI. It tests these new hypotheses about the relationship between MPR, conscription and CI using a variety of time-series models that cover all country-years from 1816 to 2011. The findings do not support the conventional wisdom, instead revealing that neither conscription nor volunteerism is independently associated with restrained initiation of military conflicts abroad. On the contrary, these recruitment practices are more likely to be associated with an increase in the likelihood of CI. These findings indicate that we should be skeptical of traditional arguments that assume conscription leads to restraint in the use of force, either independently or conditional on MPR. These counterintuitive results underscore the need for additional research on the complex relationship between MR practices, civil–military relations and foreign policy.

中文翻译：

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起草克制：征兵政策是否与国家间冲突的引发有关？


实行征兵制的国家在使用军事力量方面是否更加克制？一个常见的观点认为，征兵制限制了领导人使用武力，因为它增加了战争的政治成本，并将其更均匀、更广泛地分配给民众。尽管有这种直觉，但支持它的经验证据充其量是不确定的。本文介绍了关于征兵（MR）政策与冲突引发（CI）之间关系的新颖视角，认为军队相对于社会的规模——军队参与率（MPR）——是这个故事中一个重要但被忽视的部分。 MPR 是衡量民众承受战争成本的更直接指标，但高 MPR 也可能通过增强军事能力来增加 CI。通过将 MPR 独立地以及与征兵相互作用的方式纳入 CI 分析中，本文提供了对 MR 实践如何塑造 CI 的更全面的理解。它使用涵盖 1816 年至 2011 年所有国家/地区的各种时间序列模型来测试这些关于 MPR、征兵和 CI 之间关系的新假设。研究结果并不支持传统观点，而是表明征兵和志愿服务都不是事实。与克制地在国外发动军事冲突独立相关。相反，这些招聘做法更有可能与 CI 可能性的增加相关。这些发现表明，我们应该对传统观点持怀疑态度，即认为征兵会导致对武力使用的限制，无论是独立的还是以 MPR 为条件的。 这些违反直觉的结果强调需要对MR实践、军民关系和外交政策之间的复杂关系进行更多研究。