Numbers Assigned in the Vietnam-Era Selective Service Lotteries Influence the Military Service Decisions of Children Born to Draft-Eligible Men

• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17707197
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• Author: William G. Iacono,Christopher T. Dawes,Matt McGue,Tim Johnson
• Subject Matter: Research Note

Research Note

Numbers Assigned in the

Vietnam-Era Selective

Service Lotteries

Influence the Military

Service Decisions

of Children Born to

Draft-Eligible Men:

A Research Note

Tim Johnson

1

, Christopher T. Dawes

2

,

Matt McGue

3

and William G. Iacono

3

Abstract

Previous research has reported correlations between the military service records of

parents and their children. Those studies, however, have not determined whether a

parent’s military service causally influences an offspring’s participation in the armed

forces. To investigate the possibility of a causal relationship, we examined whether

lottery numbers issued to draft-eligible men during the U.S. Vietnam-era Selective

Service Lotteries influenced the military participation of those men’s children. Our

study found higher rates of military participation among children born to fathers

whose randomly assigned numbers were called for induction. Furthermore, we

perform statistical analyses indicating that the influence of lottery numbers on the

1

Center for Governance and Public Policy Research, Atkinson Graduate School of Management,

Willamette University, Salem, OR, USA

2

Department of Politics, New York University, New York, NY, USA

3

Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Tim Johnson, Center for Governance and Public Policy Research, Atkinson Graduate School of

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

Email: tjohnson@willamette.edu

Armed Forces & Society

2018, Vol. 44(2) 347-367

ªThe Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17707197

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subsequent generation’s military participation operated through the military service

of draft-eligible men as opposed to mechanisms unrelated to service such as “draft

dodging.” These findings provide evidence of a causal link between the military

service of parents and their children.

Keywords

recruitment/retention, public policy, military culture, family issues

Academic research has reported high rates of military participation among succes-

sive generations of the same family (Johnson and Lidow, 2016). Also known as self-

recruitment, these intergenerational patterns of military service have appeared in

Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.

1

Given the robustness of this phenomenon

across geographical contexts and time periods, some scholars have speculated about

“family traditions of service” in which a parent’s military participation itself

encourages offspring to join the armed forces (Bartlett & Jeffery, 1996; Chowdhry,

2013; Heinecken, 1997a, 1997b; Marjomaa, 2003). Whether this intergenerational

transmission actually occurs, however, is hard to substantiate: having a parent who

served in the military correlates with other factors known to influence enlistment,

such as socioeconomic status and values toward the military (Faris, 1984, p. 257). To

account for this confounding, we studied how lottery numbers assigned in the

Vietnam-era Selective Service Lotteries (VSSLs) influenced the military participa-

tion of children born to draft-eligible men. Given that these numbers exogenously

assigned a higher risk of military service to draft-eligible men (Angrist, 1990), our

research design eliminates the possibility that preservice factors correlated with a

parent’s military participation underlie the effect of a parent’s service on the enlist-

ment decisions of offspring.

2

Before discussing this research design further and reporting its findings, we first

provide context for ourstudy by explaining how the military service of parents might

influencetheir children’s military participation and how factorsincluded in the current

literature’s dominant model of military enlistment may confound the relationship

between a parent’s and a child’s military service. We then describe how data relating

to the VSSL provide an opportunity to overcome this confounding. With those con-

textual detailspresented, we then describe our researchdesign and statistical methods.

Subsequently, we report our results and finish with a discussion of their significance.

Parental Military Service and Its Confounders in Models

of Enlistment

The idea that parents can influence their children’s military participation via their

own service in the armed forces comports with the dominant model of military

348 Armed Forces & Society 44(2)