Caught In The Draft Essay

NEED TO CONVERT PAGE NUMBERS I chose “Caught in the Draft: The Effects of Vietnam Draft Lottery Status on Political Attitudes” by Robert Erikson and Laura Stoker for my journal article memorandum. This article featured in The American Political Science Review in May of 2011. I chose this article for two major reasons with the first being my passion for military history and specifically the intricacies of the Vietnam War. However, the second and much more important reason is the uniqueness of the article. Often pieces about the Vietnam War will analyze public opinion or something related to its controversy and the public but this article does not directly do this. Rather this article looks at how the randomization of the draft through the creation of a lottery system and how that affected the political opinions of the people directly affected by that system. Finally, the implications of the article are important as based on their claims, the authors argue that this is an example of how people’s political beliefs can change when policies affect them directly. …show more content…
This was partially important as this class was previously exempted from the draft through an exemption for degree-seeking college students. The auth thus more likely to be drafted tended to become more liberal and less supportive of the war. While the men with higher lottery numbers did not experience the same effect but often still remained in support of the war and their political opinions remained relatively the same. This is taken further with the assertion by the authors that the effect of the lottery system carried beyond the Vietnam years and affected people’s political beliefs in the years that followed (2011, Pages