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What Makes a Military Professional? Evaluating Norm Socialization in West Point Cadets

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Abstract

Scholars have contended that norms of professionalism are critical to understanding how militaries interact with civilian leaders and when they intervene in politics. Yet, few studies have directly examined the normative structures of military officers. Through a survey of 1468 US Military Academy cadets, this study evaluates cadets’ views toward professionalism, and in particular what is often presumed to be the dominant framework of those norms based on Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State. We identify five patterns of normative beliefs based on cadets’ views of civil–military interaction and the nonpartisan ethic: orthodox, unorthodox, inconsistent, non-committal, and motivated norms. Cadets fall into each of these categories, but approximately one-quarter demonstrate motivated norms, adhering when convenient, and otherwise dispensing with them when the rules they prescribe clash with their partisan identities. These findings, especially our novel conceptualization on norm adherence, contribute to a greater understanding of military culture and professionalism.

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We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased-information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias—the seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self-select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization—the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy.
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World culture shapes the way states generate military power: norms of conventional warfare provide the template for military organization, and norms of humanitarian law define what is morally acceptable in military operations. Sometimes, however, local strategic circumstances can challenge these worldwide technical scripts and moral codes for military action. Accordingly, this article advances an approach - cultural adaptation theory - that accounts for the role of power and politics in the worldwide normative structuring of military action. This theory explains how actors may modify their military practices in response to rising threats, in ways that avoid norm violation. Two case studies explore this theory: Irish military organization in the lead up to the Second World War, and NATO air operations in the Kosovo war. Some tentative conclusions are reached regarding suboptimal organization by weak states and operational restraint by powerful states. Overall, the article advances the case for dialogue between constructivist and rationalist approaches to security studies.
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A sociological assessment of the attitudes and behavior of American combat soldiers over the course of the war in Vietnam suggests that primary-group interpretations of combat behavior must be modified, that combat groups were characterized by instrumental relationships and affected by latent ideological factors, and that the 12-month rotation cycle was the dominating feature of the Vietnam combat experience. Troop demoralization was accentuated by diverse sources of conflict, e.g., rank, generation, drug use, and race strife. The analysis concludes with a discussion of troop reprisals (“fraggings”) against superiors and the paradoxes of the antiwar movement within the military.
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The acquis communautaire is almost always (self-re)presented as a rock hard principle, as something applicant countries have to adapt to. Employing a Nietzsche-Foucauldian genealogical method, the paper explores an important instance of intersubjectivity of meaning among European integrators, or, in concrete terms, the genealogy of the acquis . The paper explores how the acquis has become such a powerful non-negotiable condition for accession and traces one origin of the acquis back to the early 1960s, to the first round of (failed) negotiations on enlargement. The paper argues that currently there are at least two meanings of the acquis : (i) a political principle and, (ii) a legal principle, constituting a crucial aspect of constitutionalization in the European Union. Finally, the paper concludes that despite various direct political attacks, and despite the worries of several scholars, the acquis seems not at all to be an endangered principle.
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Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.