Date of Award
1-1-2021
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in Political Science
First Advisor
Conor M. Dowling
Second Advisor
John M. Bruce
Third Advisor
Jonathan D. Klingler
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
After military service is over, veterans are left to try to acclimate to their new lives. They take the lessons learned through their military career and they apply it to their daily life. One area of veteran life that remains understudied is the way that military service, combat experience specifically, alters political attitudes and behavior. The main focus of this dissertation is to understand the way that military combat alters political attitudes among military veterans. Instead of analyzing military veterans as one homogenous group, I separate veterans by combat experience. Building from the military psychology literature on combat trauma, I develop a new measure of combat experience that conceptualizes the different facets of witnessing military combat. To empirically test for the associations between my new measure of combat experience and political attitudes, I fielded an original survey of 1000 civilians and an oversample of 200 military veterans to test military veterans’ social identity, foreign policy attitudes, and trust in government. The findings show that military veterans who witness traumatic combat events are more likely to identify as a veteran, hold less hawkish foreign policy attitudes than non-combat veterans and civilians, and that military veterans have more trust in government than do civilians. These findings provide evidence that experiencing military combat can alter the political attitudes of military veterans.
Recommended Citation
Endicott, Travis W., "Components of War: How Combat Shapes Political Behavior" (2021). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2001.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2001