Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T05:49:41.826Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Are There Long-Term Effects of the Vietnam Draft on Political Attitudes or Behavior? Apparently Not

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2018

Donald P. Green ,
Tiffany C. Davenport  and
Kolby Hanson
Donald P. Green
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Columbia University 815 IAB, New York, NY 10027, USA e-mail: dpg2110@columbia.edu, kolbyhanson@gmail.com
Tiffany C. Davenport
Affiliation:
Baltimore's Promise, Baltimore, MD, USA e-mail: tiffany@baltimorespromise.org
Kolby Hanson
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Columbia University 815 IAB, New York, NY 10027, USA e-mail: dpg2110@columbia.edu, kolbyhanson@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Vietnam draft lottery exposed millions of men to risk of induction at a time when the Vietnam War was becoming increasingly unpopular. We study the long-term effects of draft risk on political attitudes and behaviors of men who were eligible for the draft in 1969–1971. Our 2014–2016 surveys of men who were eligible for the Vietnam draft lotteries reveal no appreciable effect of draft risk across a wide range of political attitudes. These findings are bolstered by analysis of a vast voter registration database, which shows no differences in voting rates or tendency to register with the Democratic or Republican parties. The pattern of weak long-term effects is in line with studies showing that the long-term economic effects of Vietnam draft risk dissipated over time and offers a counterweight to influential observational studies that report long-term persistence in the effects of early experiences on political attitudes.

Keywords

Natural experimentpublic opinionvoting behaviorVietnam draft lottery
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Summer 2019 , pp. 71 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Our thanks for helpful feedback from Alex Coppock, Winston Lin, Robert Erikson, and participants at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting, 2017. This research was conducted with human subjects approval from the Columbia Institutional Review Board, under protocol IRB-AAAN7501. The authors are aware of no conflicts of interest regarding this research. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this paper are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at doi: 10.7910/DVN/EAI1BB.

References

REFERENCES

Alwin, Duane F., Cohen, Ronald L., and Newcomb, Theodore M.. 1991. The Women of Bennington: A Study of Political Orientations Over the Life Span. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Angrist, Joshua D. 1990. “Lifetime Earnings and the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery: Evidence from Social Security Administrative Records.” The American Economic Review 80 (3): 313–36.Google Scholar
Angrist, Joshua D. and Chen, Stacey H.. 2011. “Schooling and the Vietnam-Era GI Bill: Evidence from the Draft Lottery.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3 (2): 96–118.Google Scholar
Angrist, Joshua D., Chen, Stacey H., and Song, Jae. 2011. “Long-Term Consequences of Vietnam-Era Conscription: New Estimates Using Social Security Data.” The American Economic Review 101 (3): 334–8.Google Scholar
Apsler, Robert. 1972. “Effects of the Draft Lottery and a Laboratory Analogue on Attitudes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24 (2): 262.Google Scholar
Bergan, Daniel E. 2009. “The Draft Lottery and Attitudes Towards the Vietnam War.” Public Opinion Quarterly 73 (2): 379–84.Google Scholar
Berinsky, Adam J. and Chatfield, Sara. 2015. “An Empirical Justification for the Use of Draft Lottery Numbers as Random Treatment in Political Science Research.” Political Analysis 23: 449–54.Google Scholar
Davenport, Tiffany D., Green, Donald P., and Hanson, Kolby. 2018. “Replication Data for: Are There Long-Term Effects of the Vietnam Draft on Political Attitudes or Behavior? Apparently Not.” doi:10.7910/DVN/EAI1BB, Harvard Dataverse.Google Scholar
Erikson, Robert S. and Stoker, Laura. 2011. “Caught in the Draft: The Effects of Vietnam Draft Lottery Status on Political Attitudes.” American Political Science Review 105 (2): 221–37.Google Scholar
Hearst, Norman, Newman, Thomas B., and Hulley, Stephen B.. 1986. “Delayed Effects of the Military Draft on Mortality.” New England Journal of Medicine 314 (10): 620–4.Google Scholar
Kinder, Donald R. 2006. “Politics and the Life Cycle.” Science 312 (5782): 1905–8.Google Scholar
Lau, Richard R., Brown, Thad A., and Sears, David O.. 1978. “Self-Interest and Civilians’ Attitudes Toward the Vietnam War.” Public Opinion Quarterly 42 (4): 464–82.Google Scholar
Marlantes, Karl. 2017. “Vietnam: The War that Killed Trust.” The New York Times (January 7). (https://nyti.ms/2jAkeC6), accessed March 29, 2017.Google Scholar
Mueller, John E. 1973. War, Presidents, and Public Opinion. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Notz, William W. 1977. “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: An Empirical Study of the Impact of the Draft on College Disenrollment Decisions.” Journal of Applied Psychology 62 (4): 517.Google Scholar
Notz, William W., Staw, Barry M., and Cook, Thomas D.. 1971. “Attitude Toward Troop Withdrawal from Indochina as a Function of Draft Number: Dissonance or Self-Interest?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 20 (1): 118.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Green et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EAI1BB
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Green et al. supplementary material

Appendices

Download Green et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 263.7 KB