The Bubba Effect: Contact and Racial Integration among U.S. Veterans

• In Event: Experiments on Social Norms and Identity

Abstract

Can the military serve as an engine for building social cohesion? Interpersonal contact across ethnic lines must be cooperative and egalitarian to build trust and tolerance, but these conditions are rarely met outside of lab settings. When they are, we face a thorny problem of reverse causality: individuals who are already tolerant are more likely to seek out intergroup friendship. Conversely, the military represents one of the few spaces where Americans are required to cooperate with members of other ethnic groups for prolonged periods of time. We exploit two natural experiments --- the Vietnam lottery draft, and being assigned to a racially heterogeneous vs. homogeneous squad during WWII --- to get causal leverage on this question. We estimate the effects of contact on the rates of inter-racial marriage, the probability of having inter-racial offspring, political partisanship, and policy attitudes, by triangulating evidence from three rich datasets: never-before-used survey data from WWII veterans, thousands of testimonials from the Veterans History Project which we digitize and analyze for the first time, and survey data from the CPS. Preliminary results show that Vietnam War conscripts were up to 8 percentage-points more likely to marry across racial lines, and that WWII soldiers assigned to racially mixed units were more likely to support racial integration policies. We further explore mechanisms via interviewing Vietnam war veterans. In doing so, this study seeks to inform policy debates on the effectiveness of institutional interventions that encourage intergroup mixing ---be in the military, or in classrooms, workplaces, or civic organizations across the U.S.

Authors

• Salma Mousa, University of California, Los Angeles

• Eddie Yang, University of California, San Diego