Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

David Darmofal

Abstract

This dissertation examines how contemporary political polarization affects the US military across three critical democratic touchpoints: public support for military service, voter behavior toward veteran candidates, and the rhetoric of the nation’s most senior uniformed officer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS). Although the military remains one of the most trusted public institutions, partisan conflict increasingly draws it into political debates, raising concerns about the health of civil–military relations and the sustainability of the All-Volunteer Force.

Chapter 2 investigates whether polarization reduces citizens’ willingness to recommend military service, a key driver of recruitment in a highly competitive, personnel-constrained era. Using an original survey experiment and item-count list experiment, I find that while partisan cues rarely shift attitudes in the aggregate, a substantial share of Americans privately report reluctance to recommend service because they perceive the military as “too politicized.” These underlying concerns suggest that polarization quietly weakens the recruitment pipeline by undermining trust in the military as an institution.

Chapter 3 examines whether polarization alters the long-standing electoral advantage enjoyed by military veterans. Using observational election data and a survey experiments, I show that veteran candidates retain broad cross-party appeal, but partisanship increasingly moderates this advantage. Consequently, voters evaluate veteran candidates through a partisan lens, narrowing the “veteran premium” among out-party identifiers. Even so, military service remains a meaningful electoral credential often capable of softening partisan biases under certain conditions.

Chapter 4 analyzes whether politicization extends to the highest levels of military leadership by assessing whether CJCS public rhetoric has become partisan over time. I assembled a novel corpus of 176,000+ words from speeches, press remarks, and congressional testimony delivered between 1993–2024, applying Wordscore and Wordfish text-scaling models. The results show no evidence of partisan alignment. Instead, rhetorical shifts track major strategic eras: post–Cold War drawdowns, the Global War on Terror, and contemporary great-power competition, indicating that senior military leaders continue to model the professional norm of political neutrality.

Together, my dissertation offers an integrated examination of how polarization shapes public attitudes toward the military, voter evaluations of veterans, and elite military communication. Across these domains, polarization exerts pressure but does not fundamentally compromise the apolitical character of active-duty leadership. The findings underscore both the resilience and the fragility of American civil–military relations, highlighting how institutional trust can erode quietly even as professional norms remain outwardly intact.

Rights

© 2026, Matthew Wallace Fryman

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