A paper by Human Development Lab Research Associate Juan Pedro Ronconi and Diego Ramos-Toro is now officially part of the October 2026 issue (Volume 24, Issue 5) of the Journal of the European Economic Association.
The study shows that peacetime military service in Argentina strengthened national attachment and social integration decades after conscripts served.
The article, “Nation-Building Through Military Service,” had already been published online by the journal and now appears in its print edition, completing its publication process in one of Europe’s leading general-interest economics journals.
The paper is the second half of a two-paper project on the long-term consequences of compulsory military service. Its companion, “Moving Up the Ranks: Conscription and Intergenerational Mobility,” was published earlier this year in the Journal of Development Economics.
Argentina had compulsory military service for men from 1902 until 1994. Each year, a lottery broadcast on national radio and television assigned a number to every combination of the last three digits of the national ID, and young men whose numbers fell above a cutoff were required to serve. Because the lottery determined service at random within each birth cohort, it allows researchers to compare men who were called to serve with otherwise similar men who were not.
Ronconi and Ramos-Toro combined this historical lottery with original surveys of 3,037 men across 29 cohorts, capturing their national attachment, social relationships, civic values, and life trajectories decades after their potential service.
The study finds that the effects of conscription depend heavily on the context in which service took place:
According to the authors, the main mechanisms appear to be what the service taught, whether values or basic skills, and interaction with peers from diverse backgrounds. Rather than a uniform effect of military service, the results point to an experience whose long-run consequences depend on the political and historical conditions under which conscripts served.
As several countries debate different forms of mandatory or civic service, the findings offer evidence that such programs can shape identity, social cohesion, and opportunity, while also showing that their effects depend critically on whether they take place in peace or war, and under democratic or military rule.
The publication in the Journal of the European Economic Association reflects the broader relevance of this research agenda for the study of nation-building, social cohesion, political economy, and human development.
