Military Experience and Elite Decision-Making: Self-Selection, Socialization, and the Vietnam Draft Lottery

Scholars across international relations (IR) debate the role military experience plays in elite decision-making. I argue there are two critical problems with this debate. First, it fails to adequately consider the underlying mechanisms linking military service to elite policy preferences. Second, it narrowly focuses on the use of force and largely ignores other ways in which military experience may shape elite behavior. I employ vulnerability to the Vietnam draft lottery to disentangle the impact of two key mechanisms linking military service to elite preferences: self-selection and socialization. I compare the foreign and defense policy roll call votes of Members of Congress (MCs) in the House of Representatives across the 94th–113th Congresses who were eligible for the draft and served in the military to those who were eligible for the draft but did not serve. I find significant differences in the roll call voting behavior between these groups, particularly on issues associated with arming and defense budget restrictions, as well as broader oversight of the military. These effects are heightened for MCs who served on active duty, in the military longer, and in combat, providing strong support for socialization effects. My study carries implications for civil–military relations, elite decision-making, and the study of leaders in IR.

Public Reading and the Civil War Draft Lottery

Establishing a methodology for the book as a whole, this first chapter argues that the draft connected the abstractly political and concretely biopolitical via acts of public reading that occurred at the site of the draft lottery, when names were drawn that were then further disseminated in print. A popular literary trope, reading the names generated a citizenry that could be individuated (to the level of the subject) and function as a collective (generate populations), with the draft operating as an important hinge between these two scales of biopower. The draft lottery and its depictions in images and poetry, including Herman Melville’s, formed an assemblage that connected embodied with imagined communities and linked American lives to national ideology. Wartime print periodicals did not merely report on but actively participated in practices of public reading that drew on a range of gestures to facilitate military subject formations.

Un-Fortunate Sons: Effects of the Vietnam Draft Lottery on the Next Generation’s Labor Market

We examine whether the considerable shock generated by the Vietnam draft lottery affected the next generation’s labor market. Using the universe of US federal tax returns, we link fathers from draft cohorts to their sons’ adult outcomes and find that sons of fathers randomly called by the draft have lower earnings and are more likely to volunteer for military service. Our results demonstrate that malleable aspects of a parent’s life course can influence children’s labor market outcomes and provide sound evidence that policies that only directly alter the circumstances of one generation can have important long-run effects on the next. (JEL J22, J31, J45)

Draft lottery numbers (1970)

The 1970 United States Army draft was based on a lottery to determine eligible men. A description of the statistics and consequences of the draft lottery also includes an investigation of the randomness of the process.

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

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.