The Vietnam draft lottery exposed millions of men to risk of induction at a time when the Vietnam War was becoming increasingly unpopular. We study the long-term effects of draft risk on political attitudes and behaviors of men who were eligible for the draft in 1969–1971. Our 2014–2016 surveys of men who were eligible for the Vietnam draft lotteries reveal no appreciable effect of draft risk across a wide range of political attitudes. These findings are bolstered by analysis of a vast voter registration database, which shows no differences in voting rates or tendency to register with the Democratic or Republican parties. The pattern of weak long-term effects is in line with studies showing that the long-term economic effects of Vietnam draft risk dissipated over time and offers a counterweight to influential observational studies that report long-term persistence in the effects of early experiences on political attitudes.

How does the fear of anarchy affect telephone survey behaviors? A survey experiment administered to a sample of Mogadishu residents—validated with a natural experiment—is used to assess this question. Randomly assigned reminders of anarchic violence conditioned differential effects on survey participation depending on subjects’ background level of security and welfare. Vulnerable subjects were more likely than non-vulnerable subjects to refuse to provide sensitive survey information after reminders of anarchy.

Federal systems can also provide citizens with multiple avenues to obtain service representation. In shared issue areas, citizens are officially represented by two sets of politicians. When politicians are willing to cross jurisdictional boundaries, citizens might also obtain help or information from more than one set of politicians, even in areas of exclusive jurisdiction. We report an experiment designed to examine responses to requests for assistance in different issue areas. Our sample includes 202 Canadian politicians, each of whom received two requests for assistance from fictional constituents. We show that federal arrangements can enhance service representation. On average, politicians are as helpful on issues of shared jurisdiction as issues of exclusive jurisdiction. They are less helpful for issues outside of their jurisdiction. These results suggest that federal arrangements can work to provide citizens with multiple access points to their representative, even in areas that fall outside their representatives’ jurisdictional purviews.

This paper considers the implications of construal level theory in the context of survey experiments probing foreign policy opinion formation. Psychology research demonstrates that people discount the long-term consequences of decisions, thinking about distal or hypothetical events more abstractly than immediate scenarios. I argue that this tendency introduces a bias into survey experiments on foreign policy opinion. Respondents reasoning about an impending military engagement are likelier to consider its costs than are those reasoning in the abstract hypothetical environment. I provide evidence of this bias by replicating a common audience costs experimental design and introducing a prompt to consider casualties. I find that priming respondents to articulate their expectations about casualties in a foreign intervention reduces support and dampens the experimental effect, thereby cutting the estimated absolute audience cost substantially. This result suggests a gap between how survey respondents approach hypothetical and real situations of military intervention.

How do individuals respond to internal security threats in non-democracies? Does violence make individuals more supportive of a strong state? Are the effects of violence on individual attitudes uniform, or are they heterogeneous with respect to the identity of the perpetrators? We field an online survey experiment on a national sample of Chinese citizens, in which respondents were randomly selected to view reports on violent acts in China. We show that exposure to violence makes individuals more supportive of a strong state: respondents randomly exposed to violence are more likely to approve police use of lethal force, and this effect is particularly strong among the less wealthy Han Chinese. We also find suggestive evidence that individuals exhibit intergroup biases in their reaction to violence.

What makes people take ethnic divisions into account when judging politics? We consider here the possible effect of language. We hypothesize that speaking a minority tongue primes ethnic divisions, leading people to interpret politics more heavily through this prism. In two survey experiments with bilingual adults, we demonstrate that subjects assigned to interview in a minority language are indeed more likely to evaluate politics based on ethnic considerations: they rank ethnic relations as a more important political issue and they are more likely to correctly identify the anti-minority party in their political system. These results suggest that people may think about politics differently depending on the language they use.