Year: 2010
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2010.; Includes bibliographical references.; Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. Past surveys of military elite partisanship portray an officer corps which has become increasingly conservative and Republican since the advent of the all-volunteer force, yet little research has focused on the tangible impacts party identification has on the institution itself or on critical interactions between senior military and civilian leaders during wartime. My study of military officers' partisanship cuts across political behavior and civil-military relations scholarship and examines the charge that the U.S. military's officer corps has become overly politicized in recent years. Through a large-scale, random sample survey of more than 4,000 active duty Army officers, this dissertation contributes to this debate by determining to what extent Army officers' partisanship has changed over the past thirty years, how it has been affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how it impacts civil-military relations during wartime.; In general, I find that while most officers serving today exhibit similar levels of affiliation with the Republican Party as they did a decade ago, most are also weak partisans, and I uncover little to suggest that Army officers possess different determinants that shape their political attitudes than the general public. Second, my empirical results reveal that the overwhelming majority of Army officers have highly stable political attitudes, unaffected by either service in the Army itself or by combat deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan. Finally, while I find that most Army officers' level of political activism is muted, I find that party identification does affect not only levels of political activism within the officer corps but also officers' views of senior civilian leaders and the role senior military leaders should play in decisions on the use of force. In closing, while my findings do not suggest the officer corps has become dangerously politicized, they have uncovered several fault lines in the officer corps' nonpartisan ethic that are likely to attract the attention of both civil-military relations scholars and senior military and governmental leaders alike.
Author: Heidi A. Urben
Language: English
Topic: Military and Defense Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1916194936