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Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2009 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, the 2009 New York Area Political Psychology meeting, the 2009 Northeast Political Science Methods meeting, and the 2010 West Coast Experimental Political Science Conference. The authors are grateful for the advice of participants at these meetings and from seminar participants at Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Yale University, and London School of Economics and Political Science. We are thankful for comments from Jason Dempsey, Shigeo Hirano, Luke Keele, Kathleen Knight, Jas Sekhon, and Charles Stein, as well as for the research assistance of Kelly Rader. We also appreciate the help from our reviewers and the coeditors of this journal. Financial support for the most recent data collection used here came from the National Science Foundation (grant no. SBR-9601295).
On December 1, 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, the United States' existing military draft system--highly decentralized, deeply fragmented, and loosely directed by federal guidelines--was replaced by a new policy championed by President Richard Nixon. The centerpiece of the new policy was a national draft lottery, conducted with great ceremony on national television, in which draft numbers from 1 to 366 were randomly assigned to the 366 unique birth dates of draft-eligible men. These lottery numbers set the priority order for conscription under the new system, with low number holders designated as the first to be called up for duty.
In effect, the draft lottery was a natural experiment, randomly assigning young men's vulnerability to military service in an unpopular war. The learning of one's lottery status could be traumatic, stimulating strong emotional reactions and an abrupt rearrangement of life circumstances and perceptions of self-interest. As discussed in this article, these are precisely the conditions that theory suggests can kindle changes in political attitudes. Moreover, the recipients of these life-changing lottery treatments were young men of a politically impressionable age. The combination of these factors provided the rare potential for major transformations of political attitudes as a response to the actions of government.
This article focuses specifically on one uniquely vulnerable group--the cohort of college-educated young men around 22...