Citizenship Traditions and Cultures of Military Service: Patriotism and Paychecks in Five Democracies

Ronald R. Krebs; Robert Ralston; Thierry Balzacq; David Blagden; Shaul R. Shenhav; Markus Steinbrecher

doi:10.1177/0095327X241275635

Citizenship Traditions and Cultures of Military Service: Patriotism and Paychecks in Five Democracies

Ronald R. Krebs^*
, Robert Ralston^*
, Thierry Balzacq
, David Blagden
, Shaul R. Shenhav
, Markus Steinbrecher

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Political Science

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Why do people think that soldiers and officers join the military? In this article, we report and explain unique survey results of nationally representative populations in five democracies—France, Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Beliefs about motivations for military service vary significantly by nation. In Israel and France, large majorities endorse intrinsic accounts of service motivations—that is, those centering on patriotism and good citizenship. The U.S. population is nearly evenly split between extrinsic accounts—ascribing service to the pay and benefits received or to the desire to escape desperate circumstances—and intrinsic ones. A large majority of U.K. and Germany-based respondents hew to extrinsic service accounts. We argue that the most plausible explanation lies with prevailing national citizenship discourses, in combination with the military’s operational tempo. This research has implications for public support for military recruitment, the use of force, and democratic civil–military relations.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	54-84
Number of pages	31
Journal	Armed Forces and Society
Volume	52
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X241275635
State	Published - Jan 2026

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Keywords

civil–military relations
culture
militarism
recruitment/retention
veterans

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Citizenship Traditions and Cultures of Military Service: Patriotism and Paychecks in Five Democracies

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