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Studies debunk military myths

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The research portrays America's troops as more moderate and less party-oriented than the population as a whole.

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By WILLIAM MARCH

wmarch@tampatrib.com

Published: July 26, 2009

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U.S. Army Maj. Jason Dempsey

TAMPA - New research on political opinions of U.S. service members suggests the stereotype of the military as uniformly conservative and Republican doesn't hold true.

Instead, the research portrays America's troops as more moderate and less party-oriented than the population as a whole, and they are more likely to avoid the extreme ends of the conservative-to-liberal political spectrum.

Younger enlisted personnel, the least-studied service members, mostly reflect their civilian peers. But at least one researcher says they also are much more likely to vote.

The findings come from a recently published poll concentrating on enlisted personnel in all service branches, and a study about 5 years old, but only recently made public, focusing on Army personnel.

The surveys are unusual, experts say, because historically there have been few reliable polls of the military on political beliefs.

Troops are difficult to contact for traditional, "random sample" telephone polling.

"They're hard to reach," said Michael Dimock, a researcher for the Pew Center, a polling institute. "There is no white pages for military personnel - at least not one that is publicly shared - not to mention that a large number of them are posted overseas and unreachable."

The two recent studies sought to overcome those difficulties.

One was done last year by a retired Navy captain and a political scientist from Texas, Donald Inbody; the other by a West Point professor, Maj. Jason Dempsey, now deployed to Afghanistan, and Columbia University political scientist Robert Shapiro.

Inbody used statistical techniques to compensate for lack of a random polling sample. He got e-mail addresses for service members and invited them to respond. He then weighted the responses to match the racial, gender and age makeup of the military.

Dempsey and Shapiro used an Army database of addresses, inviting soldiers to respond by mail and e-mail, and also used weighting to correct the results. They have recently been publishing results from their 2004 survey.

Both surveys found that the ratio of Republicans to Democrats is greater among service members than the general population, particularly among officers.

"The stereotype kind of holds up with the officers - more Republican and conservative," said Shapiro. "But the vast majority of the military, which is not officers, is less Republican and less Democratic than the general population and much more independent."

Shapiro and Dempsey found that nearly 60 percent of their respondents called themselves independent of either party.

Enlisted soldiers closely matched the general population in the percentage calling themselves "conservative," 32 percent; "liberal," 23 percent; and "moderate," 45 percent.

Inbody counted those who said they "lean" toward a party as partisans and, therefore, came up with fewer independents - 35 percent of enlisted personnel and 16 percent of officers.

But that's far more than the 12 percent of civilians who answered the same way in the most recent National Election Survey, a rigorous, census-type poll done after each election.

Inbody also found that younger, enlisted personnel differ little politically from civilians their age but are more likely to be interested in politics and vote.

The perception of service members as heavily Republican and conservative is long-standing.

A 1998 survey by political scientist Peter Feaver of Duke University and Richard Kohn of the University of North Carolina that focused only on officers augmented that stereotype, finding that officers called themselves "conservative" versus "liberal" by an 8-to-1 ratio and Republican instead of Democrat by roughly a 6-to-1 ratio. But Feaver said it was wrong to extend his findings to enlisted personnel. "It's a lot more likely to be more true of a colonel than a private," he said.

Feaver said the military is somewhat more conservative and Republican-oriented than the general public, but also tends to shift along with broad trends in society and likely has become somewhat less conservative since he did his research. "There may be a return to the historical position of the military as more politically independent," he said.

Reporter William March can be reached at (813) 259-7761.

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