Authoritarian Military Conscription & Democratic Consolidation in Portugal

• In Event: Institutions in Historical Perspective

Abstract

How do authoritarian legacies linked to the requisitioning of citizen support for national projects impact how voters behave under democracy? We examine this question in the context of Portugal, where a deeply authoritarian regime conscripted hundreds of thousands of citizens to fight colonial wars and then collapsed, giving way to democracy. We use original data on military recruitment and exogenous variation in regional exposure to recruitment to examine how rates of military service impacted subsequent voter turnout and expressed partisanship in Portugal’s founding set of democratic elections. Higher rates of military recruitment are associated with lower voter turnout and with voting against military-backed candidates. While the findings reveal vulnerabilities in participation for new democracies that are formed in the wake of major war, they also suggest a previously underexamined mechanism that can serve to support democratic consolidation by relegating the military to the barracks and out of politics.

Authors

• Michael Albertus, University of Chicago

• Noah Schouela, University of Chicago