Burden Sharing: Income, Inequality, and Willingness to Fight

What explains citizens’ willingness to fight for their country in times of war? Using six waves of the World Values Survey, we find that individual willingness to fight is negatively related to country-level income inequality. When income inequality is high, the rich are less willing to fight than the poor. When inequality is low, the poor and the rich do not differ much in their willingness to fight. The change in the willingness to fight between low and high inequality is greater among the rich than among the poor. We explore several explanations for these findings. The data are consistent with the argument that high inequality makes it more attractive for the rich to buy themselves out of military service.