Willingness to Defend: Meaning, Measurement and Manipulation

Which citizens will answer the call to defend their country in the event of an armed attack, and why? While the question of a population’s or an individual’s willingness to defend their own country is of critical importance, it has received limited scholarly attention outside of siloed research within the defence research agencies of individual countries. Further, existing research fails to capture the multi-dimensional concept of defence willingness or to understand how durable it is to manipulation. This project proposes three novel contributions to advance
theoretical and empirical knowledge of the willingness to defend one’s country. First, we will develop a multi-dimensional conceptual framework of defence willingness in collaboration with experts from the Baltic Sea region.
Second, we will conduct nationally-representative surveys in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to validate a cross-country measurement model based on the conceptual framework. This survey will also collect novel data on factors hypothesized to explain variation in willingness to defend. Third, we will study how durable willingness to defend is to manipulation, using a survey experiment in Sweden. The findings of this project will help to more precisely assess defence readiness across small- and mid-range countries which take a total
defence approach, which in turn has important policy implications for strategic defence planning as well as deterrence.