Abstract
The controversy over the overseas military absentee ballots in the 2000 election revolved around a single assumption: military voters identify predominantly as Republicans and tend to vote for Republican presidential candidates. Left unasked in the news coverage was whether that assumption was true and, if so, why. The military, particularly the enlisted ranks that make up about 85 percent of the military population, are overrepresented by minorities who traditionally identify with the Democratic Party. Despite that, anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests a Republican bias in party identification, although likely not to the extent imagined by some sources.
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Notes
Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Education of a General, 1880–1939 (New York: Viking, 1963).
Paul Van Riper and Darab B. Unwalla, “Voting Patterns among High-Ranking Military Officers,” Political Science Quarterly 80, no. 1 (March 1965). There are no reliable data on enlisted voting percentages during this time, but they are assumed to be generally low, based on returns of absentee ballots. See R. Michael Alvarez, Thad E. Hall, and Brian F. Roberts, “Military Voting and the Law: Procedural and Technological Solutions to the Ballot Transit Problem” (working paper, Institute of Public and International Affairs, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 2007, 3, http://www.ipia.utah.edu/workingpapers.html (accessed May 15, 2007).
Carlo D’Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2002). Asked in an online interview if it were true that Eisenhower never voted, D’Este replied, “As far as I know it is true. There is certainly no record of him voting during the period I covered. Like most of the military, he was apolitical and he had actually a great contempt for politicians like most of the career officers did.” http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/02/destes053002.htm (accessed November 27, 2006).
Ole R. Holsti and J. N. Rosenau, American Leadership in World Affairs: Vietnam and the Breakdown of Consensus (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984);
Ole R. Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996);
Ole R Holsti, “A Widening Gap between the U.S. Military and Civilian Society: Some Evidence, 1976–96,” International Security 23 (Winter 1998): 5–42;
Ole R. Holsti, “A Widening Gap between the U.S. Military and Civilian Society: Some Further Evidence, 1998–99” (paper presented at a conference on “Bridging the Gap,” Triangle Institute for Security Studies, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, July 1999).
Pearl S. Buck et al., New Evidence of the Militarization of America (Washington, D. C: National Council Against Conscription, 1949). In 1948, fearing a rise of militarization in the United States, the National Council Against Conscription (NCAC) warned that America could not remain democratic if the trends toward militarization were not checked. A year later the NCAC, with the endorsement of Pearl S. Buck, Albert Einstein, Louis Bromfield, and others, published this pamphlet. One recent notable exchange of articles voicing concern over whether the apparent civil-military cultural gap was dangerous was begun by Charles Dunlap, “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012,” Parameters, Winter 1992–1993: 2–20. The theme was taken up by Richard Kohn, “Out of Control,” National Interest (Spring 1994), and quickly responded to by Colin Powell, John Lehman, William Odom, Samuel Huntington, and Richard Kohn, “Exchange on Civil-Military Relations,” National Interest (Summer 1994). Concluding that the military was not out of control was
Deborah Avant, “Are the Reluctant Warriors Out of Control: Why the U.S. Military is Averse to Responding to Post-Cold War Low-Level Threats,” Security Studies 6, no. 2 (Winter 1996/97): 51–90.
Paul Gronke and Peter D. Feaver, “Uncertain Confidence: Civilian and Military Attitudes about Civil-Military Relations,” in Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security, ed. Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp.132–135.
Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Also see Thomas E. Ricks, “The Widening Gap between the U.S. Military and U.S. Society,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1997, 66–78, and Holsti, “Widening Gap,” 1999.
Stephen E. Frantzich, “Taxation without Representation” (unpublished case study, 1991). My thanks to Professor Frantzich for providing his case study and data. Normally, military personnel maintain voting residency based upon their residence when first entering the military service. With no action being taken, they will remain residents and eligible to vote in their original hometown until they are discharged. However, it is possible to change residency, depending on various state laws, to any state.
Jerald G. Bachman et al., “Who Chooses Military Service? Correlates of Propensity and Enlistment in the United States Armed Forces,” Military Psychology 12 (Spring 2000): 1–30, and David R. Segal, Mary Senter, and Mady Wechsler Segal, “The Civil-Military Interface in a Metropolitan Community,” Armed Forces and Society, 4, no. 3 (1978); David Segal et al., “Attitudes of Entry-Level Enlisted Personnel: Pro-Military and Politically Mainstreamed,” in Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians, pp. 163–212. My thanks to Jerald Bachman for calling this to my attention.
David R. Segal et al., “Propensity to Serve in the U.S. Military: Temporal Trends and Subgroup Differences,” Armed Forces & Society 25 (Spring 1999): 407–427.
Theodore M. Newcomb. Persistence and Change: Bennington College and Its Students after Twenty-Five Years (New York: Wiley, 1967).
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© 2008 Derek S. Reveron and Judith Hicks Stiehm
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Inbody, C.D.S. (2008). Partisanship and the Military: Voting Patterns of the American Military. In: Reveron, D.S., Stiehm, J.H. (eds) Inside Defense. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613782_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613782_12
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