Publication

This paper analyzes and discusses the effects of military service on the individual. The author takes advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the suspension of the French National Service program to produce unbiased causal analyses of the effect of national service on a range of civic engagement measures. The results of the natural experiment indicate that participation in national service does affect individual levels of civic engagement in a statistically significant way, however the degree to which mandatory national service can be considered a desirable form of civic education depends on several other factors mentioned in the report.