Military Service as a Process of Political Socialization: The Case of Universal Conscription in Israel

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  • 政治的社会化過程としての兵役：イスラエルにおける国民皆兵の事例

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Despite Israel’s adoption of universal conscription, one third of Israeli citizens avoid military service. We utilize the deviance from conscription to investigate the function of military service as a process of political socialization. This article provides an empirical examination of the effect of service in the Israeli Defense Forces on political attitudes. We test a hypothesis derived from the theory of national integration of the armed forces. That is, military experience raises consciousness of national security and produces an uncompromising defensive attitude toward the occupied territories. Data are from the Democracy Survey conducted in February 2007 among a representative sample of the Jewish population. The research design of our study applies propensity score analysis to produce as-if randomized treatment and a control group, almost the same as groups without military experience, and to control confounding variables. We demonstrate that conscripted Jewish citizens hold a similar distribution to non-drafted Jewish citizens in the categories of satisfaction with democracy, Zionist identity, opinions about leadership, and national pride. However, our analysis shows a counterintuitive result, that the experience of military service prompts opposition to Arab emigration and support for territorial concessions in the West Bank for the conflict resolution. The result is implicated in a reexamination of the theory of national integration of the military service.

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