Politicians are more likely to support conscription when they don’t have draft-age sons

Do politicians internalize the consequences of their war-related votes? A new paper published in the Journal of Political Economy finds that they do -- when their family is involved. In “No Kin in the Game: Moral Hazard and War in the U.S. Congress,” authors Eoin F. McGuirk, Nathaniel Hilger, and Nicholas Miller compare conscription-related voting records of members of Congress with and without draft-age sons. They find that legislators with sons eligible for the draft are 7-11 percentage points less likely to vote for conscription than their counterparts with daughters of the same age. The authors compiled a dataset of...