Polit Behav
DOI 10.1007/s11109-016-9334-z
ORIGINAL PAPER
Do Parents’ Life Experiences Affect the Political
and Civic Participation of Their Children? The Case
of Draft-Induced Military Service
Tim Johnson1 • Christopher T. Dawes2
Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Myriad studies show that politically-salient events influence civic and
political engagement. Yet, on the other hand, decades of research indicate that
familial factors mold political and civic dispositions early in life, before an individual experiences political events outside the family. Viewing these two lines of
research together, we ask if individuals’ political and civic dispositions might be
influenced not solely by their own experiences, but, also, by the experiences of those
individuals who create their family environment—namely, their parents. Do parents’ life experiences—before the birth of their children—affect their offspring’s
public engagement? To answer that question, we examine how the assignment of
military service, via the Vietnam-era Selective Service Lotteries, affected rates of
public participation among the children of draft-eligible men. Our analysis finds a
negative relationship between a father’s probability of draft-induced military service
and his offspring’s public participation. In addition to highlighting how parents’ life
experiences can influence the social behavior of their children, this finding challenges the prevailing view that the Vietnam conflict did not contribute to declining
civic engagement and it shows how experiences within bureaucratic institutions can
yield long-standing effects on politically-relevant behaviors.
Keywords Vietnam Selective Service Lotteries Military Conscription Civic
Participation Intergenerational Transmission Policy Feedback Bureaucracy
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11109-016-9334-z)
contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
& Tim Johnson
[email protected]
1
Willamette University, 900 State Street, Salem, OR 97301, USA
2
New York University, New York, USA
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Polit Behav
I did have a secret though. Something the politicians, the government, the
sh—y protesters and all the people of this country didn’t know. The secret
was, I survived. Not only did I survive but I was going to be alright despite all
of them. Never again would I be like them or participate in their country or
their system, or their abstract laws that made them all my equals. Not only
would I never be trapped like that again but I would see to it that none of my
children were either.
–Eddy L. Stevenson, U.S. Army, Vietnam-Era Draftee
Quoted in Hochgesang et al. (1999)
Salient life events influence political values and civic activity. Terrorist attacks,
for instance, alter political affiliations and attitudes (Hersh 2013; Marvel 2014);
crime victimization spurs voter turnout (Bateson 2012); major historical events
create cohorts of civic-minded citizens (Putnam 2000; Skocpol 1999, 2002); the
death of one’s spouse reduces the likelihood of electoral participation (Hobbs et al.
2014). Important life events, in sum, can spark or suppress public engagement.
These events, however, affect civic behaviors by pressing against the inertia of
dispositions formed in an individual’s early years (Hyman and Herbert 1959).
Research indicates that political identities and civic dispositions take root at a young
age and often persist thereafter (Converse 1969, 1976; Jennings, Stoker, and Bowers
2009; Nesbit 2013; Cicognani et al. 2012; Kim and Wilcox 2013). This political and
civic socialization, moreover, appears to be driven by the family. Individuals often
share the partisan affiliation of their parents (Jennings and Niemi 1974, 1981) and
they are much more likely to engage in civic endeavors if their parents do so as well
(Zukin et al. 2006, p. 142; Flanagan and Levine 2010). Indeed, these familial
influences led early researchers to question the importance of external events on
public engagement (Hyman and Herbert 1959, p. 74).
Since that initial research, however, a more balanced view has emerged. Studies
have recognized that salient events outside the family can offer parents an
opportunity to discuss the civic sphere with their children and, in so doing, to
transmit their political dispositions to the next generation (Sears and Valentino
1997; Valentino and Sears 1998; Pew Research Center 1998). From this perspective,
events outside the family play a role in shaping political and civic behaviors, yet the
role is subordinate: current life events simply offer a gateway through which
parents’ political dispositions can travel to the next generation.
But what about the life experiences that shaped parents’ dispositions—might
those politically-important events subsequently shape the public engagement of
successive generations? If (i) past research allows us to assume that important life
events can shape political and civic behaviors within an individual’s lifetime, and if
(ii) research also provides grounds to believe that individuals pass down dispositions
that shape their children’s political and civic behaviors, then (iii) the politicallysalient events in parents’ lives should influence their children’s civic and political
participation. No direct evidence, however, speaks to that prediction. For instance,
scholars allude to the possibility that civic practices learned in the Depression
influenced the Baby Boomer generation (Harlow-Rosentraub et al. 2006, p. 62), yet
we have found no empirical evidence supporting that claim. When research has
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offered evidence of events in a parent’s life influencing children’s civic
participation, it does not apply to our question directly. For instance, research
shows that the incarceration of a parent during a child’s life stifles the child’s civic
engagement (Lee et al. 2014); albeit focused on a significant event in a parent’s life,
this research examines the impact of an event that occurs concurrently for parent
and child. The question of how one’s public participation changes with events that
took place, prior to birth, in the lives of one’s parents has yet to be studied. Here we
perform that study by asking: does having a father who served in Vietnam affect
public engagement?
Vietnam-Era Military Service and the Public Participation
of Subsequent Generations
As the epigram of this paper suggests, military service in the Vietnam conflict
affected individuals’ lives in ways that may have altered their willingness to
participate in the community. The U.S. home front proved unwelcoming and
Vietnam veterans faced exceptional challenges during their reentry to civilian life
(Rothbart et al. 1981; Laufer et al. 1984; Kadushin et al. 1981; Egendorf 1981;
Modell and Haggerty 1991). These experiences made many Vietnam veterans
critical of their communities (Johnson 1976; Kubany et al. 1994) and research
indicates that similar sentiments emerged in the homes of Vietnam veterans (Glenn
et al. 2002). Given that the family environment plays a pivotal role in shaping
children’s public participation (Flanagan and Levine 2010) and given that Vietnam
veterans appear disproportionately more likely to live with their children (Heerwig
and Conley 2013), veterans’ experiences in Vietnam might have dissuaded their
family members’ public participation.1 We take this possibility as our central
hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1 Vietnam-era military service reduced the public participation of
children born to Vietnam veterans.
The nature of Vietnam-era military service, however, varied considerably across
participants in the conflict: some participants in the conflict faced combat, some
served reluctantly due to the draft, and others pursued service that they would have
elected to perform anyway, regardless of the draft. Past evidence indicates that the
nature of individuals’ military experiences—such as facing combat—alters their
political behaviors (Grossman et al. 2015). Indeed, since Figley (1978), research has
shown that Vietnam veterans with greater combat exposure or more stressful service
experiences (e.g., being drafted) exhibited greater levels of mistrusting, derisive,
and contemptuous attitudes toward others (behaviors labeled, when appearing
1
An alternative possibility, which we do not entertain in this paper, is that veterans’ experiences in
Vietnam altered the political attitudes and partisan affiliation of their children. The path-breaking work of
Erickson and Stoker (2011) showed that draft lottery numbers influenced the political attitudes and
partisan affiliation of draft-eligible men, as well as the extent to which those men engaged in partisan
political activity in support of Richard Nixon. Future research might profitably consider if those
attitudinal and partisan changes were transmitted to offspring.
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together, ‘‘cynical hostility’—see Kubany et al. 1994). Recent research indicates
that veterans’ family members shared this disposition (Glenn et al. 2002). Such
‘‘cynical hostility’’ may have led Vietnam veterans who faced combat or stressful
service to inhibit their children’s public engagement to a greater degree than did
Vietnam veterans with less traumatic experiences. This leads to an additional
hypothesis:
Hypothesis 2 Combat exposure or non-voluntary Vietnam-era military service led
to more substantial reductions in the public participation of children born to
Vietnam veterans.
On the other hand, past research offers reasons to suggest that Vietnam-era
military service might have stimulated, not reduced, participation.2 Erickson and
Stoker (2011) show that draft lottery numbers changed individuals’ attitudes toward
war and their party identification; although these findings do not indicate a change
in participation, they raise the possibility that the lottery altered how individuals
view politics, which, in turn, might have provoked participation among their
children. Furthermore, Davenport (2015) shows that the parents of children whose
birthdates put them at risk of military induction increased their participation relative
to the parents of children born on days with less risk of induction; this effect might
have carried over to the children of draft-eligible men. Moreover, military service—
save for service in the Vietnam conflict—is positively correlated with participation
(Teigen 2006); thus, veterans’ children might have inherited the inclination toward
participation that generally results from military service. These possibilities suggest
that the aforementioned hypotheses cannot be taken for granted; it could be that
Vietnam-era military service promoted participation, instead of stifling it.
Vietnam-era military service, however, might be confounded with a large number
of factors.3 Thus, ideally, we would be able to look at a population of veterans who
were randomly assigned service; such procedures would help us identify exogenous
variation in Vietnam-era military service. When coupled with strong assumptions
that we describe below, the Vietnam-era Selective Service lotteries, ultimately,
created such exogenous variation.
2
We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the following ways in which past research might give
reason to believe that military participation in Vietnam might have increased participation and
engagement.
3
Vietnam-era military service also might have affected mechanisms known to determine an individual’s
public participation (on those mechanisms, see Brady et al. 1995; Schlozman et al. 2012, pp. 14–21;
Nesbit 2013; Nesbit and Reingold 2011). In the supplementary materials, we report analyses examining if
Vietnam-era military service affected these mechanisms and, in turn, influenced children’s public
participation. We find no evidence to that effect; thus, here we focus solely on the direct effect of
Vietnam-era military service.
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How the Selective Service Lotteries Exogenously Assigned Military
Service to Young Men
The Vietnam-era Selective Service Lotteries4 aimed to ensure that the U.S. military
acquired sufficient personnel to execute operations in Southeast Asia during the
early 1970s. Managed by a branch of the public bureaucracy—namely, the Selective
Service System (SSS)—the lotteries designated all men born from 1944 to 1950 as
eligible for the 1969 lottery. Successive lotteries assigned eligibility solely to men
of age 19 in the given year of the lottery. In each lottery, SSS employees transcribed
all dates of the year on pieces of paper and placed these papers into plastic
ampoules. These vessels were transferred to a box, swirled, and selected one-at-atime to set the order in which draft-eligible men would be called for induction in the
succeeding year. The first date selected was pegged ‘‘Random Sequence Number
one’’ (RSN 1) and was assigned to all men born on that month and day. This group
of men would be the first called for induction in the subsequent calendar year, 1970.
The next date pulled at random received the label RSN 2; men born on that month
and day became the second group named for induction in 1970. The SSS repeated
these procedures until all dates had been assigned an RSN. The process was then
replicated, every year, until 1975.
After the assignment of RSNs, the military assessed its personnel needs and a
ceiling was placed on the highest RSN to be called in a given year. The SSS coined
this number the ‘‘Administrative Processing Number’’ (APN). The APN reached
195 in 1970, which was the year in which draws from the 1969 lottery determined
the order of induction. In the following calendar year, 1971, the APN was set at 125.
In the remaining years of the draft, the APN was set at 95, though no men were
called for induction after 1972. In other words, only lottery numbers assigned from
1969 to 1971, which resided beneath the APN, affected young men’s odds of facing
mandatory military service. Lottery numbers assigned from 1972 to 1975 had no
effect on conscription probability, regardless of whether they rested below the APN.
As the above description indicates, the Vietnam-Era Selective Service Lotteries
formed a natural experiment (Dunning 2012). The random assignment of RSNs to
birth dates created an exogenous source of variation in the risk of military service
from 1970 to 1972—that is, the years following each of the first three lotteries.
Draft-eligible men with RSNs at or below the APN faced a higher probability of
military service than men with an RSN above the APN (Angrist 1990). Then, in the
years 1972 to 1976, the lottery created a placebo test. The SSS continued to issue
RSNs and it set an APN, yet it did not conscript anyone into military service
(Angrist 1990).
Due to the unique quasi-experimental conditions it created, the Vietnam-era
Selective Service Lotteries have shed light on various social, economic, and
political phenomena. Hearst et al. (1986) and Angrist (1990) first used the lotteries
to study mortality and wage inequalities, respectively. Subsequent studies have
4
Many works have described the Vietnam Selective Service Lotteries; thus, we doubt that a truly novel
method of discussing them exists. Accordingly, we follow Erickson and Stoker (2011) and encourage the
reader to note that this section relies heavily on Baskir and Strauss (1978), Angrist (1990), and SSS
(2013).
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further investigated Vietnam veterans’ health (Conley and Heerwig 2012; Angrist
et al. 1996, 2010) and earnings (Angrist et al. 2011). Also, researchers have utilized
the lotteries to study AIDS (Hearst et al. 1991), disability (Angrist et al. 2010),
general health (Dobkin and Shabanhi 2009), occupational attainment (Frank 2012),
educational development (Angrist and Chen 2011), criminal behavior (Rohlfs
2010), incarceration (Lindo and Stoecker 2014), family dynamics (Heerwig and
Conley 2013) and political preferences (Bergan 2009; Erickson and Stoker 2011).
Here we add to this literature by examining the cross-generational effects of the
Vietnam-Era Selective Service Lotteries. By focusing on the effect that draftinduced military service had on the children of Vietnam veterans, our study
implements a research design that requires additional assumptions—relative to past
work—in order to interpret our study’s estimates as representing a causal
relationship.5 Past research has focused on how the lotteries affected individuals
who were subjected to them; thus, scholars have applied standard methods of
studying an experiment—that is, an experiment with the possibility of treatment
non-compliance (Dunning 2012)—in those investigations. Because our investigation explores the outcomes of children born to draft-eligible men, our sample is a
self-selected subset of the population and self-selection resulted from a posttreatment variable (see Rosenbaum 1984). Our design therefore will lead to the
estimation of biased effect estimates if:
(1)
(2)
children born to draft-eligible fathers who experienced draft-induced military
service (i.e. the treatment) take systematically different values in confounding
variables compared to the values taken by children who have a draft-eligible
father who did not experience draft-induced military service; and/or,
children born to draft-eligible fathers who experienced draft-induced military
service take systematically different values in confounding variables compared to the values that would have been taken by children who would have
been born, absent the draft, to draft-eligible fathers who experienced draftinduced military service.
These conditions potentially threaten the validity of causal inferences drawn
from our analysis. In the discussion section of this paper, we contemplate these
sources of bias in detail and explain why the insights of our study make a
contribution even in the worst-case scenario that the above forms of bias
contaminate our study. However, for now, we note the existence of these sources
of bias to encourage the reader to recognize the possibility that the relationship we
uncover in our study may not be causal. That is to say, only under strong
assumptions can we claim that our investigation answers the question: did draftinduced Vietnam-era military service affect the civic and political participation of
subsequent generations? But, we can confidently answer the still-relevant question:
did draft-induced Vietnam-era military service correlate with the civic and political
participation of subsequent generations?
5
We thank an anonymous reviewer for helping us identify and articulate this attribute of our study.
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Data
To address the focal question of our investigation, we turn to data from the ongoing
Minnesota Twin Family Study (MTFS). Iacono and McGue (2002) describe the
MTFS study in detail and we echo that description here. The MTFS has drawn on
Minnesota birth certificates, from 1971 to 1990, to solicit the participation of twin
pairs in academic studies. Twin pairs electing to join the study entered the MTFS
sample when either 11 or 17 years old. To initiate their participation, twin pairs
completed a series of assessments, which were then performed again approximately
every 3–4 years thereafter. The MTFS also recruited the parents of each twin pair.
Thus, the data not only possess information about twin pairs, but they also contain
information about the members of 1485 families. Included among the familial data
in the MTFS are variables relevant to our study: fathers’ dates of birth and military
service history, as well as their children’s rates of public participation. We know of
no other data with all of these variables.
However, despite containing the variables we seek, the MTFS data have
limitations. First, the sample size is small. Given that we subset the data such that it
only contains the children of draft-eligible men at roughly the age of 29, our study
contains n = 1059 total observations and ndraft-eligible = 518 observations who were
eligible for lotteries in which men were actually inducted. Second, the data solely
involve Minnesotans, who may be unrepresentative of the broader class of families
with a Vietnam veteran as a father. Third, they consist solely of families with a twin
pair in their midst, which may also make these families different than families not
including twins. Thus, our findings directly generalize to the population of twins
born in Minnesota.
Still, the MTFS data include variables relevant to our investigation. We use
father’s birth year to identify twins whose father was eligible for the Vietnam-era
Selective Service Lotteries; then, using father’s birthday and birth month, we
construct the main independent variable of our study, the RSN assigned to the father
by the SSS. Following past work (viz. Angrist 1990), we exclude men born prior to
1950, thus our test conditions consist of draft-eligible men in the 1950–1952 birth
cohorts and our placebo conditions consist of draft-eligible men in the 1953–1956
birth cohorts.
To construct the main dependent variable in our study, we turn to three survey
items that asked twins at roughly the age of 29 years to provide information about
the extent to which they agreed with statements concerning their participation in
important public activities. The statements were: ‘‘I volunteer my time for
community or public service activities’’; ‘‘I regularly contribute to charitable causes’’; and, ‘‘I vote in national or state elections.’’ Participants could respond
that they found each statement ‘‘Not at All True,’’ ‘‘Not Very True,’’ ‘‘Pretty True,’’
or ‘‘Very True’’; we coded responses from 1 to 4, with ‘‘Not at All True’’ assigned
the value of 1 and ‘‘Very True’’ assigned the value of 4. We conducted a principal
components analysis of responses to these three survey questions. All three
questions loaded onto a single dimension; the eigenvalue associated with the first
dimension was 1.675, accounting for 55.8 % of the overall variance, and the
123
123
0.529
0.539
0.025
13.814 (1.647)
14.114 (2.131)
3.275 (1.401)
3.386 (1.027)
9.299 (2.809)
0.789
13.75 (15.54)
Proportion with Grades Average or Above
Average, but Not Very Much Above (Child)
Proportion with Grades Below Average
(Child)
Years of Education (Mom)
Years of Education (Dad)
Church Attendance (Dad)
Dad’s Volunteering Inclination (Dad)
Income (Dad)
Proportion Reared by Biological Parents
(Child)
Number of Friends (Child)
29.368 (0.576)
Age (Child)
Proportion Male (Child)
-0.096 (1.245)
Father’s lottery
number at or below
APN
1950–1952 birth cohort
Civic (Child)
Table 1 Summary statistics
12.777 (11.966)
0.748
8.883 (3.077)
3.151 (1.074)
3.047 (1.338)
14.111 (2.23)
13.854 (1.813)
0.01
0.573
0.439
29.318 (0.609)
0.018 (1.325)
Father’s lottery
number above
APN
13.16 (13.481)
0.764
9.05 (2.977)
3.249 (1.059)
3.142 (1.367)
14.112 (2.19)
13.838 (1.748)
0.015
0.56
0.475
29.338 (0.596)
-0.027
(1.295)
Pooled sample
11.089 (10.115)
0.726
9.096 (2.75)
3.03 (1.000)
3.000 (0.985)
13.169 (2.086)
13.347 (1.663)
0.016
0.565
0.435
29.395 (0.609)
-0.179 (1.375)
Father’s lottery
number at or below
APN
1953–1956 birth cohort
12.348 (13.472)
0.707
8.693 (2.956)
3.22 (1.021)
3.298 (1.285)
13.645 (2.003)
13.635 (1.748)
0.017
0.573
0.398
29.432 (0.683)
-0.007 (1.238)
Father’s lottery
number above
APN
(12.783)
12.059
0.712
(2.913)
8.783
(1.019)
3.185
(1.239)
3.243
(2.03)
13.535
(1.731)
13.569
0.017
0.571
0.407
29.423
(0.667)
-0.046
(1.272)
Pooled
Sample
Polit Behav
0.49
36.613 (17.062)
0.147
0.578 (0.799)
43,984.47
(25,720.21)
Proportion Married (Child)
Hours Worked per Week (Child)
Proportion Full-Time Student (Child)
Number of Children (Child)
Pre-Tax Income (Child)
45,885.48
(32,019.94)
0.787 (0.964)
0.108
38.773 (16.395)
0.535
3.423 (1.055)
Father’s lottery
number above
APN
45,153.70
(29,738.58)
0.705 (0.908)
0.124
37.921
(16.679)
0.517
3.428 (1.081)
Pooled sample
42,018.02
(18,804.73)
0.831 (1.065)
0.097
37.968 (16.395)
0.524
3.474 (1.083)
Father’s lottery
number at or below
APN
1953–1956 birth cohort
48,110.81
(56,370.55)
0.706 (0.946)
0.127
37.981 (17.472)
0.544
3.354 (1.02)
Father’s lottery
number above
APN
(50,303.58)
46,704.78
(0.975)
0.735
0.12
(17.216)
37.978
0.54
(1.035)
3.381
Pooled
Sample
The values in each cell provide summary statistics relating to the variable in the leftmost column. Means are displayed, with standard deviations in parentheses, for
variables that are continuous or ordinal. Proportions are displayed for binary indicators
3.435 (1.121)
Father’s lottery
number at or below
APN
1950–1952 birth cohort
Number of Children (Father)
Table 1 continued
Polit Behav
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eigenvalues for the remaining dimensions were less than 1. We regard this single
dimension to be a measure of public participation and we used, as our dependent
variable, the score based on the first dimension factor loadings. Table 1 provides
summary statistics concerning that dependent variable, as well as covariates used in
our assessment of sample balance. The lattermost variables are described in the
discussion of our methods.
Methods
Our methods involve the estimation of statistical models that seek to capture how
draft-induced military service affected children’s public participation, or how draftinduced military service affected mechanisms that, in turn, affected children’s
public participation. We organize the discussion of our methods around the
hypotheses presented earlier in the manuscript. First, however, we discuss our
efforts to examine sample balance—that is, whether observations exposed to the
treatment possess covariate values markedly different from control observations.
Next, we discuss our central hypotheses that posit a direct effect of draft-induced
service on children’s participation. Then, we discuss our remaining hypotheses,
which concern how draft-induced military service might have affected mechanisms
known to drive public participation.
Methods for Testing Sample Balance Given that we study men who select into
our sample after exposure to the treatment, the possibility of post-treatment bias
exists. Although we cannot assess the extent to which unobserved factors confound
our estimates, we can examine whether systematic differences exist between the
covariate values of observations in the treatment group (i.e. observations with
fathers whose lottery numbers were at or below the APN) and the covariate values
of observations in the control group (i.e. observations with fathers whose lottery
numbers were above the APN).
Table 1 reports summary statistics for the covariates that we consider in our
exploration of sample balance. The covariates under consideration signify attributes
of the children of draft-eligible men, as well as those children’s fathers, mothers,
and nuclear families. The leftmost column of the Table lists the covariates and
indicates, in parentheses, the family member to which the variable applies. A
cursory look at the table indicates that few substantial differences exist between the
treatment and control groups in the 1950–1952 birth cohorts, which is the group for
which concerns about bias exist. The only noteworthy differences between
treatment and control units, in the 1950–1952 birth cohorts, appear to be in regard
to the proportion of male children, the volunteering inclination of draft-eligible
fathers, and the number of children born to draft-eligible men’s children. To test the
hypothesis that no differences exist between the treatment and control groups across
these and other variables, we perform simple inferential statistical tests. For all
continuous or ordinal variables, we perform Wilcoxon rank-sum tests. For all
proportions, we perform the classical two-sample test of proportions.
Methods for Testing Hypotheses 1 and 2 Hypotheses 1 and 2 posit that Vietnamera military service had a direct effect on the public participation of veterans’
123
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Two-sample test of proportions
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Number of Children (Father)
Proportion Married (Child)
Hours Worked per Week (Child)
Proportion Full-Time Student (Child)
Number of Children (Child)
Pre-Tax Income (Child)
0.313
2.269
-1.310
0.920
0.943
0.249
0.161
-1.070
-1.329
-2.137
-1.650
-0.398
0.096
-1.401
0.755
0.023
0.190
0.358
0.346
0.803
0.872
0.285
0.184
0.033
0.099
0.691
0.924
0.161
0.708
0.045
0.277
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Two-sample test of proportions
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Two-sample test of proportions
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Two-sample test of proportions
Two-sample test of proportions
Wilcoxon rank-sum
0.537
-1.215
0.920
0.039
0.421
-0.833
0.804
-0.324
-1.395
1.372
2.118
2.005
1.762
0.077
0.454
-0.744
0.517
Z-statistic
0.592
0.224
0.358
0.969
0.674
0.405
0.422
0.746
0.163
0.170
0.034
0.045
0.078
0.939
0.650
0.457
0.605
p value
Values are rounded. The leftmost column indicates a covariate collected in the Minnesota Twins Family Study that we use to assess systematic differences between the
children of draft-eligible men whose lottery numbers fell, respectively, at or below the APN, or above the APN. For all proportions, we perform two-sample proportion
tests that are two-sided. Otherwise, we use Wilcoxon rank-sum tests to infer differences between the variable values taken by children whose father’s RSN fell at or
beneath the APN and children whose father’s RSN fell above the APN
Two-sample test of proportions
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Income (Dad)
Proportion Reared by Biological Parents (Child)
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Dad’s Volunteering Inclination (Dad)
Number of Friends (Child)
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Church Attendance (Dad)
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Years of Education (Mom)
Years of Education (Dad)
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Proportion with Grades Below Average (Child)
0.375
-2.002
Two-sample test of proportions
Two-sample test of proportions
Proportion Male (Child)
-1.088
Wilcoxon rank-sum
Test
p value
Test
Z-statistic
1953–1956 birth cohort
1950–1952 birth cohort
Proportion with Grades Average or Above
Average, but Not Very Much Above (Child)
Age (Child)
Table 2 Balance tests
Polit Behav
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Polit Behav
children, though that effect may have varied based on the nature of a father’s
military service. To address hypotheses 1 and 2, we employ an instrumental variable
design to model the public participation of veterans’ children as a function of draftinduced military service. Given the random assignment of RSNs via the Draft
Lottery, a simple approach would be to calculate the difference between the
volunteering rates of draftees’ and non-draftees’ children—or some other parsimonious form of analysis appropriate for a randomized experiment. Such straightforward methods would be appropriate if the effect of draft lottery numbers on
children’s civic engagement interested us; in that instance, due to the random
assignment of RSNs, one need not worry about confounding or reciprocal causation
corrupting the effect of RSN’s on children’s civic participation. However, we aim to
examine the effect of Vietnam-era military service on the subsequent generation’s
civic engagement. As past authors have documented, many draft-eligible men did
not comply with the aims of the draft lottery (see Baskir and Strauss 1978). Through
deferrals, conscientious objection, and evasion, many draft-eligible men avoided
military service despite having lottery numbers beneath the APN (Baskir and
Strauss 1978; Angrist 1989). Thus, one cannot assume that the random assignment
of lottery numbers led to the random assignment of military service (Angrist 1990).
The instrumental variable design overcomes this problem by isolating exogenous
variation in military service resulting from the Selective Service Lotteries so that we
can estimate, given the assumptions discussed in the previous section, the Average
Treatment Effect for children born to men who complied with the induction
assignment generated via the lottery—that is, the Complier Average Causal Effect
(see Dunning 2012; Angrist 1990).
To implement our instrumental variable design, we estimate Two-Stage Least
Squares (2SLS) regression models. In the first stage of this 2SLS model, we regress
a binary indicator measuring the military participation of a draft-eligible father
(where 1 = military participation and 0 = no participation) on the number assigned
to the father in the selective service lottery. The indicator of military participation,
which we label DAD SERVED, results from an MTFS question in which fathers
could respond ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ to the question ‘‘did you serve in the military?’’ Then,
in the second stage of the 2SLS regression, children’s public participation scores are
regressed on the predicted values produced in the first stage regression. Standard
errors are adjusted to account for uncertainty in the first stage and, also, for
clustering at the family level.
Following Kelejian (1971) and, more recently, Angrist and Pischke (2008,
p. 190), we do not estimate a non-linear first stage model even though our first stage
dependent variable is binary. 2SLS employs OLS estimation in the first stage, which
ensures that residuals produced in the first stage are orthogonal to fitted values,
whereas a non-linear first stage model does not guarantee orthogonality unless the
exact functional relation of the first stage variables is known (Angrist and Pischke
2008, 190). Accordingly, 2SLS represents a conservative approach that scholars
regard as the appropriate method, even when both the first and second stages of the
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Polit Behav
model involve binary dependent variables (Angrist and Pischke 2008,
pp. 190–191).6
We also use these methods to test Hypothesis 2, thereby providing insight into
both the effect of specific military experiences on children’s participation and the
robustness of our findings to different definitions of military service. When testing
Hypothesis 2, we perform the 2SLS regression using three separate first-stage
dependent variables. The first of these variables is DAD SERVED, which was used
in the test of Hypothesis 1 and which represents the most wide-ranging definition of
military service used in our analysis. The second dependent variable we us in the
first stage regression, which we label DAD DRAFTED, is a binary indicator
signaling a father’s response to the question ‘‘Were you drafted into military
service?’’7 This variable provides an indication of self-reported, draft-induced
military service, thus allowing us to better identify if the service of veterans in our
sample resulted from mandatory conscription as opposed to volunteering. The third
version of the dependent variable we use in the first stage, which we label DAD
COMBAT, is a binary indicator conveying a father’s response to the question ‘‘Did
you serve in a combat unit in the military?’’8 This final form of the dependent
variable provides yet another way of conceptualizing the dependent variable and it
provides insight into whether or not random variation in combat participation, due
to draft lottery numbers, influenced children’s self-reported public participation. If
we find different results when enlisting this measure than when utilizing the other
first-stage dependent variables, then it may be that specific experiences in the
military bureaucracy yield different effects on a subsequent generation’s civic
participation as projected by Hypothesis 2.
Placebo Tests To assess whether findings relating to the 1950–1952 birth cohorts
occur spuriously, we also performed placebo tests—for each analysis—using lottery
numbers issued in years when no men were called for induction. Recall that, from
1972 onward, the SSS continued to conduct the draft lottery, but the RSNs drawn in
those years did not influence men’s risk of military service because personnel levels
were high enough that the SSS did not call individuals for induction based on RSNs
during those years. As a result, when studying data in those years, we should not
find a significant relationship between military service and lottery participation in
our first-stage estimates. Furthermore, we should not find a significant association
between first-stage predicted values and children’s self-reported rates of public
participation. That is to say, these placebo tests are not a means to examine if the
findings from the 1950–1952 birth cohorts exhibit bias, but, rather, to examine if the
results from those birth cohorts occurred spuriously. As discussed in our results
section, we find no such evidence in our placebo test, despite finding a significant
6
In the supplementary materials of this paper, we also report results of our instrumental variables design
produced using the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). The results of performing estimation using
GMM merit the same interpretation of the findings reported here.
7
This question was only asked to men who acknowledged serving in the military. Thus, we imputed
responses of ‘‘no,’’ for this question, for any men who said they did not serve in the military.
8
For this question, we also imputed responses of ‘‘no’’ for any men who had in an earlier question said
that they did not serve in the military.
123
123
–
0.635*
(0.058)
512
41.72
Instrument
Intercept
N
First-stage
F-statistic
0.268
(0.146)
-0.86*
(0.398)
–
0.04
539
0.113*
(0.047)
–
0.00005
(0.0002)
1st stage
dad
served
-2.291
(10.916)
18.371
(89.067)
–
2nd stage
child’s
public
partic
18.32
512
0.263*
(0.048)
–
-0.0008*
(0.0002)
1st stage
dad
drafted
0.179
(0.111)
-1.750*
(0.825)
–
2nd stage
child’s
public
partic
1950–1952 Cohort
Model 3
–
–
–
–
1st
stage
dad
drafted
–
–
–
2nd stage
child’s
public
partic
1953–1956 Cohort
Model 4
11.30
397
0.225*
(0.053)
–
-0.0007*
(0.0002)
1st stage
dad
combat
0.296*
(0.123)
-2.327*
(1.183)
–
2nd stage
child’s
public
partic
1950–1952 Cohort
Model 5
0.87
436
0.0030
(0.025)
–
0.0001
(0.0001)
1st stage
dad
combat
-0.217
(0.287)
8.234
(10.356)
–
2nd stage
child’s
public
partic
1953–1956 Cohort
Model 6
Estimated coefficients are presented without parentheses in the main cells. Robust standard errors, clustered on family affiliation, are reported in parentheses beneath the
coefficient with which they are associated. The first-stage F statistic reported in this table is the Kleibergen-Paap Wald F-statistic. Codes: * p \ 0.05. Given that no men
were called for induction after 1972, the men in the 1953–1956 birth cohorts could not be drafted, thus depriving us of a dependent variable for this analysis; one father
born in 1953 claimed, in the MTFS, to be drafted, but either this observation’s birthdate or recollection of being drafted is erroneous
-0.002*
(0.0003)
2nd stage
child’s
public
partic
1953–1956 Cohort
1950–1952 Cohort
1st stage
dad
served
Model 2
Model 1
Lottery
number
Parameter
Table 3 Tests of Hypotheses 1 and 2: is a father’s military service associated with his child’s public participation?
Polit Behav
Polit Behav
negative association between the draft instrument and children’s public participation
for birth cohorts of men whose lottery numbers were called for induction.9
Results
To assess the possibility of sample imbalance affecting our estimates, we performed
simple inferential tests on a range of covariates. Table 2 shows that, among children
born to men in the 1950–1952 birth cohorts, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of
no difference between the covariate values of children in the treatment and control
groups, except when assessing the proportion of males (Two-sample test of
proportions, z = -2.000, p = 0.045), father’s volunteering inclination (Wilcoxon
rank-sum test, z = -2.137, p = 0.035), and the number of children in the families
of observations born to men in the 1950–1952 cohorts (Wilcoxon rank-sum test,
z = 2.269, p = 0.023). We find similar results when considering evidence relating
to children fathered by men in the 1953–1956 birth cohorts (please see Table 2); in
that subset of our data, we can reject the null hypothesis of no difference between
the covariate values of treatment and control conditions only when considering
Fathers’ years of education (Wilcoxon rank-sum test, z = 2.005, p = 0.045) and
church attendance (Wilcoxon rank-sum test, z = 1.966, p = 0.049). Were we to
employ a correction for multiple-hypothesis testing, none of these differences would
be deemed statistically significant. Thus, we proceed knowing that balance in
observed covariates militates against estimate bias, though we report regression
models in the supplementary materials of this paper that also control for covariates.
Given the relative homogeneity in observable confounders across treatment and
control conditions, we proceed to our instrumental variable analyses. Instrumental
variable analyses—as noted by Hahn and Hausman (2002), Murray (2006), and
Baum et al. (2007)—can magnify the bias of OLS estimates in the event of
underidentification (i.e. rank deficiency) or weak identification (i.e. diminutive
correlations between the instrument and the endogenous predictor). We reject the
null hypothesis of underidentification (Kleibergen-Paap statistic = 32.19,
p \ 0.001) when testing Hypotheses 1 and 2 via our 2SLS models using DAD
SERVED as the endogenous regressor in data concerning men in the 1950–1952
birth cohorts. Furthermore, our first-stage F-statistic in those tests vastly exceeds the
weak-instrument heuristic test of Staiger and Stock (1997), which posits that an
F-statistic greater than 10 signals sufficient instrument strength (First-Stage F
statistic = 41.72). Consistent with those tests, the first stage of Model 1, displayed
in Table 3, indicates a negative relationship between fathers’ lottery numbers and
their acknowledgement of having served in the military; the coefficient indicating
this relationship is estimated with sufficient precision that we can reject the null
hypothesis that the coefficient equals zero. We would expect this relationship, given
9
Note that our placebo test only includes the first-stage dependent variables concerning whether or not a
father served in the military, or whether or not a father experienced combat in the military. After all, the
other first-stage dependent variable, which indicates whether or not a father was drafted, contains no
variation since no men were drafted in the years that fathers in the placebo cohort could have been
drafted.
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Polit Behav
that lower lottery numbers were called first for induction among men in the
1950–1952 birth cohorts. Furthermore, the coefficient on the instrument in the
second stage equals -0.86 (Robust standard error = 0.398, p = 0.03, 95 %
confidence interval = [-1.644, -0.085]), thus indicating a negative relationship
between draft-induced service and the public participation of men’s children
(Table 3, Model 1). In substantive terms, this finding suggests that, on average,
children reduce their score on our scale of participation by nearly 1/3 of a standard
deviation for every standard deviation increase in their father’s probability of
engaging in draft-induced service (standardized coefficient = -0.318).
Our corresponding placebo test, involving men from the 1953–1956 birth
cohorts, indicates no such relationship. When conducting our placebo test using
DAD SERVED as the first-stage dependent variable, we cannot reject the null
hypothesis of underidentification (Kleibergen-Paap statistic = 0.04, p = 0.833) and
our first-stage F statistic indicates a very weak instrument (First-Stage F
statistic = 0.04). The vast standard error associated with the estimated coefficient
in the first stage regression corresponds with those signs of instrument invalidity. In
the second-stage model, the estimated coefficient for the instrument, DAD SERVED,
sits in a wide 95 % confidence interval that extends across zero. These findings
provide us greater confidence that we did not obtain spurious results when studying
the 1950–1952 birth cohorts.
In sum, estimates resulting from models using DAD SERVED as the instrument
offer evidence consistent with Hypothesis 1 (see Table 3, Models 1 and 2). To test
Hypothesis 2, we enlist alternative measures of military service that offer insight
into the details of draft-eligible men’s military experiences. We first replace DAD
SERVED with DAD DRAFTED, our indicator of whether a father considered his
service non-voluntary. Again, we can reject the possibilities of underidentification
(Kleibergen-Paap statistic = 16.43, p = 0.001) and instrument weakness (F-statistic = 18.32), and we find a significant negative relationship between draft lottery
numbers and DAD DRAFTED (see Table 3, Model 3). In the second stage, we find a
negative relationship between a father being drafted into service and his child’s selfreported public participation also appears. The coefficient estimate associated with
the instrument of DAD DRAFTED equals -1.75 (Robust standard error = 0.825,
p = 0.034, 95 % confidence interval = [-3.368, -0.132], with a standardized
coefficient suggesting that a one-standard deviation increase in a father’s probability
of being drafted decreases his child’s score on this study’s public participation scale
by roughly four-tenths of a standard deviation (standardized coefficient = -0.437).
This finding accords with the results obtained when using DAD SERVED, albeit
indicative of a larger effect size; in so doing, it offers support for Hypothesis 2,
which predicts that more onerous forms of military service, such as compulsory
service due to being drafted, may have a stronger effect on children’s civic
participation.
Given that no men were drafted from the 1953 to 1956 birth cohorts, we cannot
perform a placebo test that incorporates the variable, DAD DRAFTED—no men,
whose RSNs were either above or beneath the APN, were drafted. Instead, we
perform another analysis that examines whether an even more challenging form of
military service—namely, inclusion in a combat unit, as signified by the variable
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DAD COMBAT—leads to even steeper declines in an offspring’s public participation. With DAD COMBAT as our first-stage dependent variable, we obtain a
significant negative relationship between draft lottery numbers and our endogenous
predictor (see Table 3, Model 5). Furthermore, we can reject the null hypothesis of
underidentification (Kleibergen-Paap statistic = 10.21, p = 0.001) and our instrument obtains sufficient strength (First-stage F statistic = 11.30). The estimated
coefficient associated with DAD COMBAT corresponds to a larger effect than
comparable models estimated using DAD SERVED or DAD DRAFTED; the
estimated coefficient equals -2.327 (Robust standard error = 1.183, p = 0.049,
95 % confidence interval = [-4.646, -0.008]). The standardized coefficient
suggests that a one-standard deviation increase in a father’s probability of draftinduced inclusion in a combat unit decreases a child’s score on the public
participation scale by just over half of a standard deviation (standardized
coefficient = -0.546). These figures yield evidence consistent with Hypothesis 2.
We found starkly different results in our placebo test involving DAD COMBAT.
As in the placebo test involving DAD SERVED, our instrumental variables approach
was invalid. We could not reject the null hypothesis of underidentification
(Kleibergen-Paap Statistic = 0.87, p = 0.351) and the instrument was very weak
(First-stage F statistic = 0.87). Furthermore, we could not reject the hypothesis of
no relation between draft numbers and combat experience in our first stage estimate
(see Table 3, Model 6). No relationship also could be found between our instrument
and children’s public participation (see Table 3, Model 6). These placebo results
suggest that, among children born to men in the 1950–1952 birth cohorts, the
relationship between a father’s draft-induced inclusion in a combat unit and his
child’s public participation is not spurious.
Discussion and Conclusion
In this paper, we have shown that a negative relationship exists between a father’s
Vietnam-era military service and his child’s public participation. Our most
conservative estimates indicate that children’s scores on our scale of public
participation decline by about one-third of a standard deviation for every standard
deviation increase in their father’s probability of draft-induced military service. This
relationship grows in magnitude when using father’s non-voluntary enlistment in
the military or their inclusion in a combat unit as a predictor of their child’s public
participation. Not only do these findings indicate a relationship between Vietnamera military service and the public participation of subsequent generations, but they
also indicate that this relationship fluctuated with veterans’ experiences in the
military bureaucracy—as predicted by past research (Figley 1978). While these
findings offer promising grounds on which to build future research on the
intergenerational effects of parents’ political experiences, they should be interpreted
conservatively.
First, as mentioned above, our study design might be subject to post-treatment
bias. The children of men whose lottery numbers were called for induction might
systematically differ from the children of men whose lottery numbers were not
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called for induction and these differences might have affected public participation.
Also, children born to draft-eligible fathers who experienced draft-induced military
service may take systematically different values in confounding variables compared
to the values that would have been taken by children who would have been born,
absent the draft, to draft-eligible fathers who experienced draft-induced military
service. These possibilities threaten the validity of causal inferences drawn from our
analyses, but, nonetheless, we still believe our findings are worth presenting.
For one, with respect to the first mentioned source of post-treatment bias, our
research design contains measures that mitigate the effects of observable factors
driving differences in participation across the treatment and control groups. Life
course research, for example, indicates that the major source of differences between
the lives of veterans and nonveterans, along with their families, is delayed incidence
of important life events: veterans spend several years in the military, thus foregoing
activities—college, marriage, and so on—that might have taken place during their
service (Elder and Bailey 1988). As a result, one would expect the children of
Vietnam veterans to be younger than those of nonveterans. Our study resolves this
problem via the construction of our data. Information about the children in our
sample were collected when observations were about 29-years old; given that the
Vietnam-era Selective Service Lotteries made it such that men of a common age
were subject to the draft, our sample consists of veterans and nonveterans born at
the same time who had children at the same time. While this feature of our data
limits the population to which we can generalize our results, it eliminates the most
glaring potential source of bias—namely, that Vietnam veterans had younger
children in our sample due to the postponement of fatherhood due to military
obligations. Furthermore, we found no evidence that the children of draft-eligible
men with an RSN at or beneath the APN had, on average, a different number of
siblings than the children of draft-eligible men with an RSN above the APN (i.e.
which freed them from forced induction). Thus, it seems unlikely that the pattern of
births among veterans and nonveterans in our study differed, thus militating against
that potential source of bias. Likewise, good balance exists in our sample, thus
providing further empirical evidence that, with respect to observable confounders,
the first of our above-mentioned concerns is unwarranted. Furthermore, in the
supplementary materials we present models that control for various potential
confounders and obtain very similar results to those reported here.
However, to the extent that it is impossible to control statistically for all
differences, we cannot completely rule out all forms of confounding. For instance,
perhaps fathers who returned from Vietnam and immediately had children (thus
keeping up with members of their birth cohort who were not drafted) were brash
individuals (they couldn’t wait a few more years to have children, unlike their
undrafted peers) and this attribute—as opposed to Vietnam-era military service—
led their children to participate in the public sphere at different rates than the
children of undrafted men. Such possibilities potentially bias our estimates. Thus,
despite our best efforts to show that we find balance among observed variables, we
encourage a careful interpretation of our estimates due to the possibility that
unobserved differences might exist between men with a high risk of draft-induced
military service and men with a low risk of such service. If those lurking variables
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exist and have an effect on our findings, then the estimates produced in this study
are biased and they might make the conclusions we have drawn from the findings of
this paper absolutely wrong.
Second, we find little reason to believe that the draft induced some men not to
have children, or that children who went unborn due to the draft would have differed
systematically from the children of draft-induced veterans that we observe in our
study. Studies seeking to understand the effect of draft-induced military service on
family outcomes make no mention of draft-induced service impeding the birth of
children (see, e.g., Heerwig and Conley 2013; Teachman 2009). Draft-induced
service might have prevented the birth of some children to the extent that military
service created higher rates of mortality among draft-induced veterans, but no such
evidence exists. Furthermore, this problem represents an over-arching problem even
with studies focused solely on outcomes pertaining to draft-eligible men.
Ultimately, military service in Vietnam may have created ‘‘attrition’’ from the
samples studied in past research (e.g., Angrist 1989). Those studies do not compare
the outcomes of Vietnam veterans with the outcomes of Vietnam veterans who
would be in their sample were it not for their deaths in the Vietnam conflict. Thus,
regardless of whether we study Vietnam veterans themselves or their children, this
problem persists. Nonetheless, we have included, in the supplementary materials of
this paper, an investigation in which we use a separate data set to consider whether
the draft-induced risk of military service influenced the number of children a drafteligible man fathered, wanted to father, or expected to father. In this novel
investigation, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that a man’s draft-induced risk of
military service did not affect the number of children he fathered, wanted to father,
or expected to father.
Still, we cannot reject the possibility that our estimates suffer from confounding
and do not warrant a causal interpretation. In situations such as ours, Rosenbaum
(1984, p. 664) advised that the problem of bias might be best resolved by simply
revising our expectations about what the findings can tell us. That is, if our analysis
contains bias, we still learn that a child’s public participation was associated with
their father’s draft-induced military service. This finding is historically interesting
and the grounds for future social science research, though it would be quite separate
from the claim being made in this paper, which contends that a fathers’ experiences
in the Vietnam conflict influenced their children’s public participation.
A more troubling problem might result from the fact that we compose our
measure of public participation out of survey responses, which means that our main
outcome is self-reported. It could be that the children of men whose lottery numbers
were called for induction are more likely to report lower levels of public
participation than are the children of men whose lottery numbers were not called for
induction because of some other factor—say, honesty (for a general discussion of
this problem, see Ansolabehere and Hersh 2012). If that is the case, then our finding
is simply an artifact of self-reporting bias.
Third, like many other studies, our results reflect individuals’ public participation
at a given stage in their lives, not across the full lifespan. Though at 29-years old an
individual might be well settled into a pattern of participation, it could be that
children who exhibit lower levels of civic participation in our study may have
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completed different levels of participation, relative to their peers, at other ages.
Thus, a more complete longitudinal analysis might offer even further insight to the
results discovered in the present paper.
Fourth, in this paper we have studied a sample that limits the generality of our
findings. Twins and their families may possess unique characteristics that make
them different from the broader population. Furthermore, our data come from
Minnesota alone; thus, our results may not apply to individuals in other states. An
analysis that uses the present research design on more representative data would
enhance our understanding of the generality of the present findings.
The current results offer reason for such an investigation. This study’s findings
provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, of children’s political behavior
potentially co-varying with salient, isolated events that occurred, prior to their birth,
in their parents’ lives. That is, whereas past anecdotal evidence suggests that the
Depression influenced the Baby Boomer generation (Harlow-Rosentraub et al. 2006,
p. 62) and more rigorous research suggests that parental incarceration during a
child’s life stifles the child’s civic engagement (Lee et al. 2014), this study raises the
possibility that specific, definable parental events occurring before a child’s life
relate to that child’s public participation.10 Our study’s main contribution may very
well be that it provides evidence of that relationship.
Our results also contribute to efforts to understand civic decline in the second
half of the twentieth century. Since the foundational works of Skocpol (1999) and
Putnam (2000), efforts to understand declining civic participation have not only
shed light on an important social trend, but they have revealed general information
about the factors that shape how individuals engage with their communities.11 Our
research indicates that Vietnam-era military service, a factor past scholars deemed
orthogonal to declining civic engagement, may have accentuated civic decline. That
is, civic decline started prior to the onset of the Vietnam conflict and it continued
well after, thus the decrease in public participation observed in our study may have
heightened the civic declines of the late-twentieth century. Identifying how
Vietnam-era service affected late-twentieth century civic engagement is particularly
informative as this literature has placed emphasis on the notion that periods of war,
generally, have led to increases in civic engagement (Skocpol 2002). Not so, it
seems, when it comes to Vietnam.
In fact, even more generally, previous works have claimed that war unifies
communities (Hedges 2002), increases pro-social behaviors (Bauer et al. 2014), and
inspires political participation (Blattman 2009). Our research—along with Teigen
10
We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing us in this theoretical direction. Also, we wish to note
that if one defines an event in a parent’s life broadly enough, then we certainly would contend that
evidence exists for intergenerational influence. That is, if a life event is defined broadly, a parent’s
educational experiences or work training might qualify as an event and with high likelihood those factors
influence a child’s later public participation to some extent. In other words, the fact that we view an event
as a relatively narrow and definable experience is partly responsible for why we know of no other studies
providing evidence of the type we report here.
11
We would be remiss not to note that a significant portion of civic decline might be attributable to
changes in the population eligible to participate (McDonald and Popkin 2001). Viewed in these terms the
story of declining participation is not one of individual volition, but institutional rules changing who can
participate.
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Polit Behav
(2006), which finds lower electoral participation among Vietnam veterans—
complicates this literature by raising the possibility that the effect of war on prosocial behavior may not be uniform. Some conflicts may hamper civic involvement
by creating internal divisions, altering the allocation of resources and opportunities,
and/or fostering legitimate resentments, such as those concerning the Vietnam
conflict, which are displayed in the epigram of this paper.
Our study raises the possibility that the effects of the Vietnam conflict spilled
from one generation to the next. This observation indicates the importance of
intergenerational factors on social behavior. While past research has shown that
genetic factors influence social behavior, demonstrating the relationship between
environmental factors and a subsequent generations’ social behaviors has been
difficult. Due to the unique features of the data we study, our investigation provides
evidence that a relationship exists between the events experienced in one generation
and the social behaviors that a subsequent generation exhibits. This finding suggests
that further attention should be paid to the ways in which cultural transmission
(Richerson and Boyd 2005) and the family environment (Healy and Malhotra 2013)
shape social behaviors.
Finally, we believe our study contributes new understanding to the persistence of
policy feedback (Pierson 1993). Past studies have shown that policies, such as the
G.I Bill, have influenced subsequent civic engagement (Mettler 2002). Here, we
show that policies might carry long-term effects for politically-relevant behaviors in
subsequent generations that were not themselves directly subject to the policies in
question. In so doing, we also show that exposure to bureaucratic institutions can
influence political behavior well into the future (Moynihan and Soss 2014). Future
studies might consider examining other potential long-term political implications of
the policy. For instance, Erickson and Stoker (2011) show that draft numbers
influenced the political attitudes and partisan affiliation of draft-eligible men, such
that men with lower draft numbers became ‘‘more antiwar, more liberal, and more
Democratic in their voting’’ (Erickson and Stoker 2011, p. 221)—could these
attitudes have been transmitted to subsequent generations? Subsequent research
should entertain that possibility.
Furthermore, in light of our findings, the opening epigram of this paper raises the
possibility that Vietnam veterans may have taken an active role in directing their
children away from civic participation. If so, then that action adds force to the
hypothesis of Sniderman and Bullock (2004), which posits that institutions play an
important role in shaping politically-relevant decisions. That is, the family unit
represents a central institution in most individuals’ lives; to the extent that it frames
the options available for political choice, political science research should take
heed.
Acknowledgments We received helpful advice on an earlier version of this manuscript from audience
members and fellow panelists at the 2014 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting. Also,
three anonymous reviewers, as well as the past and present editors of Political Behavior, offered
insightful comments that improved the paper.
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