What drives the decisions individuals make during wartime service? How do groups develop capacity to execute collective violence? How do democracies mobilise their populations to fight?
I study these questions across American history from the Civil War, through racial violence in the Postbellum South, to the early stages of World War II. I develop theory at the individual-level, drawing from an interdisciplinary lens to answer these questions. I find that Irish-Americans who fled famine desert more in the Civil War since they are more risk averse. I show that counties settled later by whites lynch more often and have a greater capacity for collective action to demarcate racial interactions. I find that conscription and volunteering are complements in the sense that citizens are responsive to the threat of the draft and strategically enlist. In each study I collect and re-purpose large administrative datasets to measure new quantities such as an individual’s malnutrition in youth or how distinct names were across racial lines. I then deploy contemporary quantitative methods to test hypotheses with these large historical datasets, using designs such as regression discontinuities and new panel methods. I strive to use several different measurement strategies in each paper to develop a body of evidence in cases where clean identification is not feasible. I contribute to our understanding of when and why soldiers enlist and desert in cases of mass mobilisation. I also portray the importance of considering collective violence as a collective act; raising and coordinating a mob was necessary for lynchings to proliferate. Additionally, this work speaks to the importance of evaluating episodes of organised violence as a form of political behaviour. With the re-emergence of mass conventional warfare, it is crucial to diagnose the factors which define whether troops join and how they behave when on the frontlines.
Dylan Potts is a LSE Fellow in Political Science and Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics. Prior to doctoral research at the EUI Dylan completed a BA and MA at Durham University. His research interests include political violence, historical political economy, and democratisation.