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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
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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 

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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.

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Green et al. Dataset

Dataset

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

Green et al. supplementary material

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