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Forces & Society

Cadet Perceptions of Military and Civilian Ideology: A Research Note

Rachel Milstein Sondheimer, Kevin Toner and Isaiah Wilson III
Armed Forces & Society 2013 39: 124 originally published online 9 April 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X12442304
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Cadet Perceptions
of Military and Civilian
Ideology: A Research
Note

Armed Forces & Society

39(1) 124-134
The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X12442304
http://afs.sagepub.com

Rachel Milstein Sondheimer1, Kevin Toner2, and

Isaiah Wilson III1

Abstract
Evidence of an actual or perceived gap in ideological beliefs between civilian and
military communities informs current debates on the military and its relationship to
broader society. The authors examine one cohort of the military and its members
perception of their own ideology in relation to their civilian counterparts using a
2009 survey of cadets at the United States Military Academy. The authors ascertain
cadet perceptions of (1) cadet ideological leanings on individual and aggregate levels,
(2) the ideological leanings of the civilian population, and (3) the civilian populations
assessment of the militarys ideological leanings. The authors attempt to discern
whether or not this military subpopulation perceives itself as different from the rest
of society. The authors find that while members of the Armys future officer corps
perceive themselves as more conservative than their civilian peers and society writ
large, as a group they hold rather moderate political views.
Keywords
civilmilitary relations, professionalism, civilmilitary gap, ideology, West Point

1
2

Department of Social Sciences, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA
United States Army, USA

Corresponding Author:
Rachel Milstein Sondheimer, Department of Social Sciences, United States Military Academy, 607 Cullum
Road, West Point, NY 10996, USA
Email: Rachel.sondheimer@usma.edu

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125

In November 2009, Chuck Norris participated in a question and answer session

with cadets at the United States Military Academy. While he became famous for his
martial arts movies and shows like Walker: Texas Ranger, Norris returned to the
spotlight in 2008 through an appearance in a Mike Huckabee presidential advertisement. When a cadet asked Norris about politics, he proclaimed, Im not a Democrat
or a Republican. Im a conservative. The lecture hall erupted in applause.
Chuck Norris Q&A with cadets at West Point is illuminating in terms of evaluating the intent and effectiveness of Department of Defense (DoD) policies to
develop and maintain a nonpartisan military force.1 The goal of such policies is to
avoid the inference or implicit appearance of partisanship or endorsement of particular candidates, policies, and ideas by members of the Armed Forces and thus by the
Armed Forces itself. By trying to divorce itself from partisanship, the DoD attempts
to present itself and its members as lacking an inherent view of the role of government (i.e., an ideology) so that it can dispense expert military advice when called
upon by civilian leaders.
Despite the DoDs efforts to appear nonpartisan, how did Norris sense that his
comment about conservatism would garner such enthusiasm? Conventional wisdom,
informed anecdotally by journalist accounts,2 incidents like a uniformed member of
the National Guard endorsing Ron Pauls presidential aspirations at a 2012 rally, and
more systematically through research on military beliefs and ideology,3 suggests
that service members tend to register as Republicans and fall on the conservative
side of the ideological spectrum. However, much of the academic work on this topic
indicates that this trend is more nuanced than cursory interpretation implies.4 Of particular importance to this work is the notion that some of this civilmilitary gap may
be shifting such that the ideological makeup of members of the active military
closely mimics that of the broader American population.5
In this work, we attempt to gain traction on some of these conflicting reports by
collecting data on the actual and perceived ideologies of one cohort of the military
population. We present data collected from a 2009 sample of cadets at the United
States Military Academy. We examine how military cadets perceive themselves
as individuals, view each other as a distinct group, and see other subpopulations
within society, most notably their generational peerscivilian college students.
The intent of our study is to ascertain cadet perceptions of (1) cadet ideological
leanings on individual and aggregate levels, (2) the ideological leanings of the
civilian population, and (3) the civilian populations assessment of the militarys
ideological leanings. By examining how cadets view themselves and the civilian
population as a whole, we attempt to discern whether or not this military subpopulation perceives itself as different from the rest of society. We are interested in
whether or not the military actually has a different ideology than the civilian population but also whether or not this is perceived to be the case. We find that while
members of the Armys future officer corps perceive themselves as more conservative than their civilian peers and society writ large, as a group they hold rather
moderate political views.

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Previous Research
A handful of studies illuminate the contours of the civilmilitary gap in ideology and
partisanship. The most oft-cited survey motivating this literature is an extensive investigation of the party identification and ideological leanings of members of military and
civilian populations undertaken by the Triangle Institute for Securities Studies (TISS)
in the late 1990s.6 In this sample, military leaders differ significantly from elite nonveteran civilians on matters of party and ideology. According to the TISS survey, 64
percent of the military leaders self-identified as Republican, 8 percent as Democratic,
and 17 percent as Independent. Elite nonveteran civilian respondents self-identified at
rates of 30 percent, 43 percent, and 20 percent, respectively. In terms of political ideology, 67 percent of the military leaders self-identified as somewhat or very conservative, 28 percent as moderate, and 4 percent as somewhat or very liberal compared to
elite nonveteran civilian respondents who self-identified at respective rates of 32 percent, 28 percent, and 38 percent.7 A first look at the data thus highlights what Feaver
and Kohn and other scholars refer to as the gap in civilmilitary relations.8
More recent data on military beliefs confirm but also complicate these core findings.
Dempsey provides data, collected among members of the Army prior to the 2004 presidential election, indicating a possible occupational rift in beliefs.9 Like the TISS survey, Dempsey finds the senior officer corps (majors and beyond) to be dominantly
conservative. Dempsey also provides data drawn from cadets at the United States Military Academy indicating that 61 percent of those surveyed identified with the Republican Party and 61 percent identified themselves as conservative. Urbens 2009 survey
confirms the general pattern of military officer identification with the Republican Party
and a conservative ideology.10 However, there are some caveats to each of these findings. For example, when Dempsey examines the enlisted ranks, a different pattern
emerges, one showing a much less conservative and more moderate body that closely
mimics civilian society. Dempseys results indicate that, taken as a whole, the ideological beliefs of members of the Army tend to mimic those of the general population in
the United States. While Urben finds a consistent trend toward Republicanism, her data
indicate that this group tends to express weak partisan affiliation.
Much of this research rests on respondents self-identification with a particular
party or ideology. There is the possibility, though, that some of these responses are
influenced more by social expectations than inherent beliefs. Dempsey, for example,
finds that nearly half of the West Point cadets in his survey felt pressure to identify
with the Republican party.11 As such, we do not know whether these respondents
self-identified ideology and partisan affiliations are in line with their stances on various issues. How accurately do cadets assess and perceive their own political ideology and the ideology of their peers? Is the civilmilitary gap actual or perceived?

Data Collection and Methodology

Data were collected from a cohort of cadets at the United States Military Academy.
Cadets in the sample were enrolled in American Politics during the Spring Semester

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127

Figure 1. The four quadrant ideological grid.

of 2009. The course is required of all cadets and is generally taken during a students
yearling (sophomore) year although some plebes (freshmen) enroll in the course as
well. American Politics instructors taught a total of 508 students across twenty-nine
sections of the course. Four hundred and seventy students completed the survey.
This sample population is not a representative sample of the military, the Army,
or the Army junior officer Corps. However, accounting for cadet perceptions is a
useful gauge of future Army leadership.
Data collection was integrated as part of a lesson on political ideology. At the
beginning of the lesson, instructors displayed a quadrant grid (Figure 1) in their
classrooms. The cadets were expected to have read a chapter on political ideology
prior to the days class meeting and instructors were told not to answer any questions
seeking explanations of the meaning of the diagram. Students were first asked a
series of questions regarding perceptions of their own political ideology, the political
ideology of the Corps of Cadets and the military, and the political ideology of portions of the civilian population (see Appendix A for complete survey instrument).
Specifically, cadets were asked to place each of these populations within one of the
quadrants in Figure 1. Students were also asked to reflect on how they believe the
military is viewed by the civilian population at large. The penultimate task in this
survey redirected cadets to http://www.politicalcompass.org where each student
answered a series of questions on a range of issues. A proprietary algorithm uses the
respondents answers to pinpoint a coordinate on Figure 1 representing that respondents political ideology. Finally, after completing the Political Compass ideology
test, cadets were asked to input the resulting coordinate representing their unique
ideological position on Figure 1.
It is important to briefly review our interpretation of the political ideology connoted by each quadrant. The upper-left quadrant connotes a populist ideology in

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Armed Forces & Society 39(1)

popular parlance, the upper-right quadrant a conservative political ideology, the

lower-left quadrant a liberal ideology, and finally, the lower-right quadrant a libertarian political ideology. Our expectation is that results scattered across all of these
quadrants would indicate an inability or lack of an ideological perception of a
given group while any sort of dominance of one quadrant would indicate a defined
perception of an ideological leaning.

Results
Ideological Perceptions
Table 1 provides an overview of the pertinent results regarding perceptions of military and civilian ideology. Overall, the results are quite stark with cadets eliciting
strong perceptions of themselves, the Corps of Cadets as a whole, and the military
as conservative and their civilian college peers and the civilian population at large
as more liberal.
The first question asked cadets to place themselves into one of the four ideological quadrants. Unlike the rest of the perception questions, the survey did not include
an other option, forcing the respondents to select a quadrant. Over half of all
cadets surveyed placed themselves in the upper-right quadrant, indicating that they
perceive themselves to be economically and socially conservative. Conversely, only
13 percent identified themselves as economically and socially liberal by placing
themselves in the lower left. The ideology receiving the second most selfplacements was the lower-right or libertarian quadrant with 22 percent of cadets.
Finally, 12 percent of cadets placed themselves in the upper-left, populist quadrant.
Based on the results of this sample, we estimate that about half of the Corps views
themselves to be ideologically conservative. While the possibility of sampling error
impedes our ability to say that this is the ideological belief of the majority of cadets,
we can say that it is the dominant self-identified ideology among the cadets.
Cadet self-identification is not the main purpose of this study. The subsequent
data highlight our more innovative research into how cadets perceive themselves
as a group, especially in comparison to their civilian counterparts. Following the
self-identification question, we asked cadets which quadrant they felt best characterized the ideological leanings of the Corps of Cadets. A definitive trend toward a perceived conservative political ideology among the Corps is evident with 69 percent of
respondents seeing the Corps of Cadets as falling into the conservative quadrant.
Eleven percent placed the Corps in the populist quadrant, 5 percent in the liberal,
and 11 percent in the libertarian. Approximately 4 percent chose the other category, with each of the eighteen cadets who responded other describing the Corps
of Cadets as having no dominant ideological quadrant. A clear majority of cadets
surveyed perceive themselves, as an organization, to be politically conservative.
Next, we sought to discern cadet perceptions of the ideological beliefs of their
civilian counterparts. In describing the ideological leanings of the civilian student

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Table 1. Cadet Ideological Perceptions

Quadrant
Populist
Conservative
Libertarian
Liberal
Other

Self-placement
of individual
cadets (%)
12
52
13
22

Cadet
Cadet
placement placement
of corps of of military
cadets (%)
(%)
11
69
5
11
4

19
60
6
10
4

Cadet
placement
of civilian
college
students (%)

Cadet
placement
of civilian
population
(%)

Cadet
placement
of civilian
perception of
military (%)

8
4
73
12
2

21
8
37
22
12

8
78
6
7
1

population, 344 of the cadets, or 73 percent, placed the civilian student population in
the liberal quadrant. This is nearly the mirror opposite of the 69 percent who placed
the Corps in the conservative quadrant. Likewise, only 4 percent of cadets viewed
civilian college students as conservative. When comparing itself as a Corps to the
broader population of college students, a majority of cadets see the Corps of Cadets
as conservative yet view the civilian college student body as liberal. Thus, we begin
to see the makings of a perceived civilmilitary gap.
We expanded our research beyond a comparison of college students to see how
cadets view larger society. The survey asked cadets to place the militarys political
ideology as well as the civilian populations ideology on the quadrant diagram, with
the results drawn from Table 1. With regard to the military, 60 percent of cadets
characterize the military as conservative, 19 percent as populist, 6 percent as liberal,
and 10 percent as libertarian. Similar to the rest of the survey questions, the 4 percent
choosing the other category describe the military as not falling predominantly in a
particular quadrant.
In placing the civilian population as a whole, cadet responses did not present
nearly the disparity between civilians and the military as between the Corps of
Cadets and civilian college students. However, there is still a stark contrast in the
way cadets see the military and the civilian population in terms of political ideology. A plurality of respondents, 37 percent, places the civilian population in the
liberal quadrant. Twenty-two percent respond that the population falls in the libertarian quadrant, 21 percent in the populist quadrant, and 12 percent in the
other category. Interestingly, however, only 8 percent place the civilian population in the conservative quadrant, the lowest percentage in any quadrant.
Although no single quadrant dominates in this question, the conservative quadrant
has a markedly lower number of responses than all other response choices. As
such, we can say the respondents generally view the military as conservative and
the civilian population as not conservative.
The last question in this part of the survey asked cadets how they think the civilian population views the military. In other words, if we were to ask members of the
civilian population to place the military in a quadrant, how do you think they would

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they respond? Returning to Table 1, we see that responses to this question present the
strongest trend toward one quadrant with 78 percent responding that the civilian population perceives the military as conservative. The next highest response proportion
was the 8 percent that characterize the military as populist, while 6 percent placed
civilian perception in the liberal quadrant and 7 percent placed civilian perception
in the libertarian quadrant. The data here indicate that a vast majority of respondents feel that civilians perceive the military as an ideologically conservative organization. Cadets believe that a civilmilitary gap exists and think that civilians see
this gap as well.

Ideological Realities
Cadet perception of ideological positioning paints a polarized picture of civilian and
military ideological space. What these data do not tell us, though, is whether or not
these perceptions are accurate measures of individual ideological belief systems.
The last piece of the survey was designed to capture these beliefs. Recall the penultimate part of the survey asked cadets to redirect their web browsers to take an ideological identification quiz on www.politicalcompass.org. After going through a
series of questions on a range of policy issues, the website provides respondents with
a coordinate placing them on the ideological grid depicted in Figure 1.
If cadet perceptions of their ideological beliefs are correct, we should observe
more than half of all respondents being placed in the conservative quadrant. The
scatterplot of each respondents political compass coordinate, depicted in Figure 2,
indicates that the data do not follow the expected trend. Not only do most cadets
not fall in the conservative quadrant, it appears that the plurality of cadets fall into
the lower-left or liberal quadrant. The data in Table 2 confirm this visual assessment by compiling the percentage of cadets placed into each category based on
their Political Compass coordinates. Almost 40 percent of cadets earn a coordinate placing them in the liberal category with just 23 percent placed in the conservative quadrant.
Unlike the self-perceptions of ideology analysis above, the data culled from the
Political Compass responses show a more even distribution across the quadrants. As
seen in Table 2, while the lower-left quadrant has a clear plurality of the Political
Compass placements, the distribution among the other quadrants is less lopsided
than the distribution of self-placements. The mean coordinate of all of the points
reflects this apparent lack of a dominant political ideology in the Corps with the
average across all cadets falling at ( .387, .070). Moreover, most of the points are
clustered near the center with few outliers, indicating that regardless of the dominant
ideological tendencies of the Corps, most cadets have moderate beliefs.
One can argue that the validity of the results concerning individual ideology rests
solely on the validity of the Political Compass quiz and algorithm. For example, if
the metric is skewed toward a liberal ideology, the indication of a somewhat liberal
Corps of Cadets might belie its actual conservative nature. Because the Political

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Figure 2. Scatterplot of individual cadet ideology based on political compass test.

Table 2. Comparison of Self-Ideological Placement and Politicalcompass.org Ideological

Placement
Quadrant
Upper left
Upper right
Lower left
Lower right

Self-placement
of cadets (%)

Politicalcompass.org coordinate
placement of cadets (%)

12
52
13
22

22
23
39
16

Compass creators do not publish their algorithm, we are unable to independently

evaluate the validity of their measure. However, we can situate the results within the
contemporary political landscape allowing for some useful comparisons. The operators of the Political Compass completed an analysis of the 2008 presidential primary
candidates and found all of the major candidates (to include the then Senators Barack
Obama and Hillary Clinton) residing somewhere in the top-right quadrant. While we
perhaps cannot say that cadets, as a whole, fall into the liberal quadrant, we can say
that using this metric, the cadets, as a whole, appear more economically and socially
liberal than the sitting president at the time that he was running for the office.

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Conclusion
The results of our study of cadets are quite stark. Cadets believe that military and
civilian populations occupy drastically different ideological spaces. Cadets see their
own cohort as ideologically distant from their college-aged peers. They perceive the
military as a whole to be ideologically conservative while the civilian sector seems
to be liberal. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of subjects believe that civilians
perceive the military as conservative.
That a subsample of the military population perceives itself to be ideologically
distinct from its civilian counterparts raises clear concerns over the deleterious consequences for the military to meet the intent of rules that seek to avoid inferences of
partisan political approval. While we avoid asking about partisanship in the survey,
we can interpret these results to mean that cadets perceive their organization and the
military as having a particular view of the role of government that is distinctly different from that of the civilian population. If cadet reaction to Chuck Norris is any
indication, existing DoD policies or the Armys professional military education programs may require reevaluation.
The irony here, of course, is that these perceptions of conservative ideological
dominance are likely misperceptions. A sample of the Corps of Cadets indicates a
relatively disperse distribution of ideological leanings among its members, which
if anything, can be characterized as moderate, if not somewhat liberal, in nature.
If the Corps of Cadets and the military are perceived as being politically conservative, when this is not the case within the Corps and perhaps not within the military,
then we must begin to decipher who or what is shaping this misperception. What is
the source of this distortion?
In addition to expanding this current line of work to other military and civilian
populations, future research ought to delve into the origination of perceptions of the
military as being politically conservative and why. Another broader vein of research
concerns socialization into military culture throughout ones career. If Dempsey is
correct that the senior military leadership seems to be a particular ideological bent,
how does the ideological dispersion we observe at the cadet level morph into apparent uniformity from precommissioning to flag ranks? Perhaps, something about military socialization instills a particular view of the world that might put it at odds with
its civilian counterparts in the policy process. This line of inquiry is particularly
important to the maintenance of military professionalism in the policy realm. We
must continue to investigate the causes of the civilmilitary gap and acknowledge
that it might be a problem of perception.

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Appendix A
Survey Questions
1. In which quadrant do you place yourself? (upper left, upper right, lower left,
lower right)
2. Which quadrant best characterizes the Corps of Cadets? (Upper left, upper right,
lower left, lower right, other [please describe and be specific])
3. Which quadrant best characterizes the military? (Upper left, upper right, lower
left, lower right, other [please describe and be specific])
4. In which quadrant do you place your mother/mother surrogate? (Upper left,
upper right, lower left, lower right, NA)
5. In which quadrant do you place your father/father surrogate? (Upper left, upper
right, lower left, lower right, NA)
6. Which quadrant best characterizes civilian college students? (Upper left, upper
right, lower left, lower right, other [please describe and be specific])
7. Which quadrant best characterizes the civilian population? (Upper left, upper
right, lower left, lower right, other [please describe and be specific])
8. In which quadrant do you think the civilian population would place the military?
(Upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right, other [please describe and be
specific])
Please go to politicalcompass.com and take the ideology quiz
9. What are the results from your ideology quiz? (actual coordinates)
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Pat Shields and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on
earlier versions of this article. Any errors of fact or judgment are the responsibility of the
authors. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not represent
the views of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, and/or the
Department of Defense.

Authors Note
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Interuniversity Seminar on the Armed
Forces and Society held in Chicago in 2009. This article also builds on previous research
reported in Attitudes Arent Free: Thinking Deeply About Diversity in the U.S. Armed Forces
(Air University Press, 2010).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: Partial funding for this study was provided in the form of
Faculty Research Development Grants through the United States Military Academy.

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Notes
1. The DoD issued Directive 1344.10 in the months leading up to the 2008 presidential election,
updating its policy on the political activities of the Armed Forces. As Section 4 of the Directive indicates, the DoD charts a fine line in encouraging its members to carry out the obligations of citizenship while simultaneously keeping with the traditional concept that
members on active duty should not engage in partisan political activity and that members not
on active duty should avoid political activities implying official sponsorship, approval, or
endorsement. The directive indicates, there are prohibitions on certain behaviors in the
political arena, but for the most part, the directive leaves it to the individual to decide what
activities might imply official sponsorship, approval, or endorsement. At the time of this
writing, this Directive is up to date but the DoD will probably revise and reissue something
along these lines in 2012. Department of Defense Directive 1344.10: Political Activities by
Members of the Armed Forces, Public Law Directive 1344.10, (2008).
2. Thomas E. Ricks, Making the Corps (New York: Scribner, 1997).
3. Peter Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, eds., Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap
and American National Security (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
4. Ibid.; James T. Golby, The Democrat-Military Gap: A Re-Examination of Partisanship
and the Profession (Chicago, IL, 2011).
5. Jason K. Dempsey, Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American Civil-Military Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 70-94.; Heidi Urben, Civil-Military Relations in
a Time of War: Party, Politics, and the Profession of Arms (PhD, Georgetown University).
6. Peter Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and
American National Security (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
7. Ole R. Holsti, Of Chasms and Convergences: Attitudes and Beliefs of Civilians and Military Elites at the Start of a New Millennium, in Soldiers and Civilians: The CivilMilitary Gap and American National Security, ed. Peter Feaver and Richard H. Kohn
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 15-99.
8. Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National
Security.
9. Dempsey, Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American Civil-Military Relations.
10. Urben, Civil-Military Relations in a Time of War: Party, Politics, and the Profession of Arms.
11. Dempsey, Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American Civil-Military Relations, 169-72.

Bios
Rachel Milstein Sondheimer is an assistant professor in the Department of Social
Sciences at the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA.
Kevin Toner was an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the
United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, and is currently serving as a Public Affairs Officer in Afghanistan.
Isaiah Wilson III is an associate professor and director of the American Politics,
Policy and Strategy Stem in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States
Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA.
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