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Do Parents’ Life Experiences Affect the Political and Civic Participation of Their Children? The Case of Draft-Induced Military Service

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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.

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Notes

  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.

  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.

  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).

  5. We thank an anonymous reviewer for helping us identify and articulate this attribute of our study.

  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.

  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.

  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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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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  1. Willamette University, 900 State Street, Salem, OR, 97301, USA

    Tim Johnson

  2. New York University, New York, USA

    Christopher T. Dawes

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Correspondence to Tim Johnson.

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Johnson, T., Dawes, C.T. Do Parents’ Life Experiences Affect the Political and Civic Participation of Their Children? The Case of Draft-Induced Military Service. Polit Behav 38, 793–816 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9334-z

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