Military Service and Legislative Agendas: A Study of Legislators in Four States

• Published date: 01 April 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X19848009
• Date: 01 April 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Military Service and

Legislative Agendas:

A Study of Legislators

in Four States

Rebecca Best

1

and Greg Vonnahme

1

Abstract

Candidates often highlight military experience on the campaign trail. Do they also

govern differently? This study examines whether and how military experience is

associated with state lawmaking. We examine legislative productivity, success rates,

and the substantive content of legislation with a large original data set. The data

include over 60,000 bills introduced in four state legislatures over a 10-year time

span, coded for their substantive focus. It also includes information on character-

istics of over 4,000 legislators. Our analysis of these data indicates that veterans do

not differ in overall levels of productivity but do have common legislative agendas.

Veterans’ shared legislative agendas are not narrowly confined to defense or

security issues but vary depending on state context. This is, to our knowledge, the

most extensive empirical analysis of the legislative behavior of veterans in a single

study.

Keywords

veterans, legislative behavior, civil–military relations, public policy

I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.

John Kerry (2004, Democratic National Convention)

1

Department of Political Science, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, MO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Rebecca Best, 213 Haag Hall, 5100 Rockhill Rd., Kansas City, MO 64110, USA.

Email: bestrh@umkc.edu

Armed Forces & Society

2021, Vol. 47(2) 367-385

ªThe Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0095327X19848009

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These were John Kerry’s first words in accepting the 2004 Democratic nomination

for president. The introductory video that preceded his speech was 8 min and 45 s

long, over one third of which talked about his connections to the military. At the

2008 Republican National Convention, John McCain’s introductory video was com-

parable in both its length and its emphasis on his military service. Tammy Duck-

worth’s U.S. Senate campaign website had six paragraphs on the “Meet Tammy”

page. Her military experiences were mentioned in all six and featured prominently in

three (https://web.archive.org/web/20161004115749/; http://tammyduckworth.com:

80/meet-tammy). In 2016, an advertisement featuring Democratic candidate for

Senate Jason Kander assembling a rifle while blindfolded and discussing his military

service was widely hailed as the best political ad of the year (Stevenson, 2016).

Kander also highlighted his military service in television ads for his 2012 campaign

for Secretary of State (Celock, 2012).

M. J. Hegar’s 2018 campaign to rep lace Republican John Carter in th e U.S.

House of Representatives went viral when her campaign released an advertisement

that featured Hegar detailing the story of the day her helicopter was shot down in

Afghanistan. Within 2 days of th e video’s release, Hegar’s l ong-shot campaign

raised US$700,000 and within less than a month, the video had been viewed online

more than 5 million times (Schouten, 2018). Eric Greitens’ 2016 gubernatorial

campaign webpage prominently featured a picture of him in military uniform, and

three of the six sentences in his “Meet Eric” page addressed his military connections

(https://web.archive.org/web/20160816004530/https://ericgreitens.com/ and https://

web.archive.org/web/20160819053322/https://ericgreitens.com/about/). New Jersey

Assemblyman R. Bruce Land, twice awarded the Bronze Star for his service in

Vietnam, lists his military service as part of his Twitter bio (limited to 160 charac-

ters) and on his political website. Roger Roth, President of the Wisconsin Senate,

discusses his military service in three of the first six sentences in his “About”

webpage (https://rothforwisconsin.com/about-us/, accessed February 21, 2019).

Candidates for public office often make military service and experiences a feature

of their campaigns.

Veterans campaign differently, and studies show a positive albeit limited elec-

toral benefit of prior military service at the state and national level (McDermott &

Panagopoulos, 2015; Teigen, 2012, 2018).

1

Do veterans govern differently? The

counterfactual would be puzzling. If military service did not matter at all, why would

candidates focus on it? Why would voters? Are candidates responding to the Amer-

ican public’s high levels of trust in the military,

2

to voter expectations that they are

more knowledgeable about particular issues, or something else entirely? At the

federal level, there is evidence that legislators with military experience behave

differently with regard to decisions to use force and to escalate crises; however,

there is no evidence that veterans legislate differently on other issues (Betts, 1991;

Feaver, 1995; Feaver & Gelpi, 2004; Gacek, 1994; Gelpi & Feaver, 2002; Horowitz

& Stam, 2014).

368 Armed Forces & Society 47(2)