What Explains Trust in the Military? A Lab-in-the-field Experiment in Ukraine

• In Event: Militaries and the Public: Representativeness, Trust, and Intervention

Abstract

Trust in the military’s ability to uphold national security is vital to the function of a state. Nevertheless, public opinion research explaining trust in the military is limited to developed countries with high state capacity and advanced militaries. We examine the determinants of trust in the military using a lab-in-the-field experiment in Ukraine. Ukraine stands in contrast to developed countries in that its military recently proved incapable of dealing with either Russian occupation in Crimea or a Russian-backed separatist insurgency in the Donbas region in 2014, ceding much of the fighting to ‘volunteer battalions.’ We thus conduct an experiment in a place where trust in the military’s fundamental duty to protect is an open question and where there are potential alternatives to the military in terms of the provision of national security.

We carried out seventy-two six-person focus groups across nine Ukrainian cities. Groups in each city were randomly assigned video appeals to support the armed forces from both army and volunteer battalion veterans of the Donbass conflict along with a video montage about corruption in the armed forces. As expected, news of corruption generally decreased trust, but the effect was muted among those that also received a video appeal from a former volunteer battalion fighter, especially if the appeal came in the respondent’s native language. The findings suggest that local fighters from pro-government militias may be vital for states seeking to restore faith in the conventional armed forces and may even offset previously held negative attitudes.

Authors

• Konstantin Ash, University of Central Florida

• Miroslav Shapovalov, University of Central Florida