The study of war and democracy is replete with paradoxes: Often denigrated as irresolute and weak, democracies are skilled at war and at managing their reciprocal relations peacefully. Similarly, while war often leads democracies to compromise their principles and curtail the freedom of their citizens, in its aftermath war as often leads to an expansion of political and civil rights. The books under review here, while different in style, format, scope, and argumentation, directly engage these paradoxes by investigating the impact of war on democratic institutions and democratic political processes. The premise of both books is that the question of the consequences of war for democracy has not received the attention it deserves. Seminal contributions to the topic have been made by Otto Hintze, Harold Lasswell, Charles Tilly, Peter Gourevitch, Arthur Stein, and Mary Dudziak. But theoretically and empirically, the field is understudied.

For a phenomenon that endangers the survival of individuals, societies, and institutions, such as war, we would expect its consequences to be profound, pervasive, and easily detectable. The examples that promptly come to mind when we think of the subject, from the extension of electoral suffrage to the increase in taxation, would lend prima facie credence to that supposition. But in the very first chapter of In War's Wake, Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder deliver a startling null finding: In their large-n analysis of the impact of war on democratic transition, they fail to find any systematic pattern whereby war can be seen as a cause of democratization. In their view, “[b]ackground factors like economic development, the character of the neighborhood, and the legacy of prior political institutions are, in almost all cases, far more important to democratization than any process triggered by war” (p. 45).

This finding creates a tension that the editors, Elizabeth Kier and Ronald Krebs, masterfully exploit to deliver a volume that explores the many facets and mechanisms through which war might affect democratic politics and society. Readers looking for a grand theory of the consequences of war will be disappointed because the volume provides none. In the concluding chapter, Miguel Angel Centeno accurately summarizes the volume's intellectual journey through the topic of war's consequences for democracy: “The findings of the chapters … indicate that war has a potentially important role to play in the development of democracy, but it is certainly not necessary or sufficient, and may even contribute to developments antithetical to democracy” (p. 261).

The major response that the editors and individual authors offer to address the Mansfield and Snyder intellectual challenge is a classic move of good scholarship: to “unpack” concepts and explore the conditions under which a phenomenon might occur. Surely, there is more to democracy and war than standardized measures would capture. And surely, a blanket statement that, on average, war is as likely to foster democratic developments as it is to hamper them would raise the question of when and why those alternative outcomes occur. As a result of these efforts, readers who seek nuanced explanations, rich in historical detail, will find inspiring investigations that uncover novel puzzles and set the agenda for further studies.

In War's Wake is divided into three sections that explore the impact of war on democratic transitions and institutions, on civil society and political participation, and on executive authority and the reach of the state into society, respectively. As an illustration of the first major theme, Nancy Bermeo discovers that “[d]emocracies that emerge during or after armed conflict tend to last longer than democracies that emerge in peacetime” (p. 67). Intuition would tell us that if democracies that emerge in difficult conditions survive a crucial gestation stage, they would then be likely to survive for the long haul. They would be a specially selected group. The question then becomes what makes democracies born in the crucible of war special. Bermeo identifies two groups of hypotheses to answer her puzzle: The first pertains to the ways in which armed conflict places constraints on spoilers, that is, political agents that might later attempt to overthrow democratic rule; the second group concerns how armed conflict changes the organizational basis of politics in a country. Bermeo does not attempt to provide a full test of her theory, which requires a detailed study of the conflict democracies that reverted to authoritarian rule, in addition to a comparison between peacetime and conflict democracies; but she lays the groundwork for such an empirical analysis and, in so doing, provides a pathbreaking analysis of the consequences of war for democracy.

In the second section of the volume, the focus shifts to civil society and political participation. In this group, the contribution by Rieko Kage stands out for the careful and novel examination of how “mobilization during war, especially major war, presents citizens with opportunities for social learning that are typically not present during peacetime” (p. 101). Kage specifically argues that the effects of war mobilization on civic participation are independent of the outcome of war, and, thus, they are as likely to emerge in defeated societies as they are in victorious societies. Kage tests her argument through regression analysis of the determinants of associational membership in 13 countries involved in World War II, as well as a case study of the Japanese YMCA in the city of Kobe. Scholars interested in the quality of democracy will have to engage Kage's argument and evidence for a long time.

In the final section, the theme becomes the expansion of executive authority to the detriment of liberty and recruitment policies. The essays by Krebs, Daniel Kryder, and Deborah Avant canvass an extensive literature in order to disentangle how levels of mobilization and the portrayal of war aims by leaders might extend the reach of government into society. The cases under investigation cover a vast period, from the citizen army of Napoleonic France to France's war in Algeria; but the concerns of these essays hit closer to “home,” as they sift through history to explain how current wars and current developments in the use of private security forces impact the politics of our times.

A similar concern also permeates The Casualty Gap, an in-depth examination of the human costs of war in the United States by Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen. Their investigation turns on two fundamental steps. First, they establish as a matter of empirical fact that in the United States, “Communities with lower levels of income, educational attainment, and economic opportunities have paid a disproportionate share of the human costs of war” (p. 4). They document that the unequal distribution of casualties across communities with lower levels of economic and educational attainments emerged with the Korean War and became more widespread over time. The “casualty gap,” therefore, predates the advent of the all-volunteer force under President Richard Nixon, a finding that Kriner and Shen attribute to the smaller scale of the Korean War draft, on the one hand, and the practice of the deferment and exemption system during the Vietnam War, on the other. As they state, “By 1964, almost 30 percent of men registering for the draft received some type of deferment in contrast to only 9 percent in 1944. Those remaining in the pool had increasingly fewer economic and educational opportunities than those exempted” (p. 76).

Second, the authors demonstrate through experiments and regression analysis that the unequal distribution of casualty rates affects the attitudes of Americans toward the use of force, as well as their voting choices and their levels of civic engagement. The Casualty Gap is an exemplary application of normal science in the study of American politics; it builds upon existing theories on the role of information on political behavior, as well as the impact of personal contact, elite cues, and local media coverage. As a result, the book is rigorous, as it methodically sifts through vast arrays of data. Although its argumentation style, deeply steeped in the canons of the discipline, is oftentimes sterile, its message should be seriously engaged: How wars are fought and by whom they are fought deeply matters for democratic politics in the United States.

In an important chapter on the patterns of civic engagement, Kriner and Shen warn of an undemocratic cycle that might be triggered by limited wars, whereby “[s]ociety demands the greatest wartime sacrifice from communities that already possess low levels of resources essential to civil life. These costs of war, in turn, further depress the active participation in government of the very groups with the greatest stake in forging the nation's critical military policy decisions” (p. 193). Their findings thus challenge some of the conclusions in the edited volume, as well as those recently presented by Christopher Blattman (in the American Political Science Review), who claims that the greater levels of voting and community leadership among ex-combatants in Northern Uganda should be attributed to personal growth and political activation that occurred in war, and those by Christopher Parker in a celebrated book and in the Journal of Politics on the impact of the experiences in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War on the political activism of black veterans. As much as In War's Wake has shown the theoretical relevance of the modes of mobilization to explain the differential impact of war on democracy, The Casualty Gap forcefully places the distribution in the costs of war on the theoretical agenda.

In a famous line of Just and Unjust Wars (1977), philosopher Michael Walzer stated that “[w]ar is most often a form of tyranny. It is best described by paraphrasing Trotsky's aphorism about the dialectic: ‘You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you’” (p. 29). If we ever doubted the wisdom of that line, the books by Kier and Krebs and by Kriner and Shen easily put those doubts to rest, as they make it clear that war, sometimes surreptitiously and sometimes blatantly, is indeed interested in us. These two books have delivered lasting contributions that will likely spur renewed interest in the study of the consequences of war for democratic politics.