Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CMC Senior Theses CMC Student Scholarship 2015 South Korean Men and the Military: The nflueI nce of Conscription on the Political Behavior of South Korean Males Hyo Sung Joo Claremont McKenna College Recommended Citation Joo, Hyo Sung, "South Korean Men and the Military: The nflueI nce of Conscription on the Political Behavior of South Korean Males" (2015). CMC Senior Theses. Paper 1048. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1048 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you by Scholarship@Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in this collection by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CLAREMONT MCKENNA COLLEGE South Korean Men and the Military: The Influence of Conscription on the Political Behavior of South Korean Males SUBMITTED TO Professor Jennifer M. Taw AND Dean Nicholas Warner BY Hyo Sung Joo for SENIOR THESIS Fall 2014 December 1st, 2014 2 3 ABSTRACT This thesis evaluates the effects of compulsory military service in South Korea on the political behavior of men from a public policy standpoint. I take an institutional point of view on conscription, in that conscription forces the military to accept individuals with minimal screening. Given the distinct set of values embodied by the military, I hypothesize that the military would need a powerful, comprehensive, and fast program of indoctrination to re-socialize civilians into military uniform, trustable enough to be entrusted with a gun or a confidential document. Based on the existence of such a program and related academic literature, I go on to look at how a military attitude has political implications, especially for the security-environment of the Korean peninsula.