Military Personnel, Order Following, and Anti-Democratic Leadership
通过实验研究美国军人如何应对反民主的总统领导，发现军人反应存在分歧，国会两党的民主信号能鼓励他们违抗非法命令，而军方领导层的信号则无效。
Over the last decade, elected leaders across a number of established democracies have sought to subvert democratic processes. These moments create a dilemma for public employees who have competing allegiances to neutral competence and protecting popular sovereignty. Some recent work has explored how public employees respond to this dilemma but, to date, few studies have focused on military personnel. This is an important omission because, historically, militaries have played an important role in determining whether democratic states turn toward autocracy. As such, this paper reports on the results of an experiment that explored how U.S. military servicemembers respond to anti-democratic leadership. It makes three basic findings. First, servicemembers responded in conflicting ways to anti-democratic presidential leadership: some remained committed to following orders while others indicated an openness to disobeying illiberal presidential orders. Second, a pro-democracy cue from a bipartisan Congress emboldened respondents to disobey unlawful orders; in contrast, a pro-democracy cue from military leaders had no effect on servicemembers’ views. Third, an exploratory analysis revealed that respondents’ answers were associated with several socio-demographic characteristics. Taken together, the results suggest that servicemembers would be divided about how to respond to anti-democratic leadership. Ultimately, their interpretation of an illiberal moment may depend upon counter-messaging from elected officials and their individual-level characteristics.