I am grateful for the opportunity to carry on a conversation between our two books. It is an honor to have such a respected scholar provide such thoughtful feedback.

Weeks assesses Democratic Militarism’s “most important theoretical” claim to be its linking of lower income to hawkishness. While this finding lends confidence to the larger theory’s implications (many parts of which are harder to test statistically), in hindsight I wish the book had placed more emphasis on its other key variable—military doctrine. Thanks to the capital-intensive requirements of modern war, in rich contemporary democracies the costs of conflict are low for all citizens. They are lower still for the majority relative to the wealthy.

The subtly different mechanisms for inequality and capitalization also help address the guns and butter question to which Weeks devotes significant attention. Imagine that the government provides the median voter’s preferred basket of public goods. It is perfectly plausible that a relatively poor median voter would prefer much more social welfare than defense. But it is also plausible that this voter desires a non-zero amount of national security spending. As her tax burden for public goods goes down, she will demand that the government provide more of both butter and guns. On the other hand, if (as I argue) capitalization makes arming less costly relative to social spending, the median voter will demand more guns relative to butter.

Democratic Militarism finds no evidence that income affects individuals’ threat assessment but considerable evidence that it affects attitudes towards defense spending and hawkish security policy preferences. ^{Footnote 1} Weeks suggests that while rich people might prefer less overall spending, they would prefer that more of it go towards defense, an hypothesis the book does not test. But, given the aforementioned empirics, such a relationship would simply strengthen the hawkish preferences of the body politic.

As Weeks points out, my tests reveal a more complicated relationship between macro-level measures of inequality and militarism. I suggest a number of plausible, post hoc explanations for why exceptionally unequal democracies (which also tend to be quite poor) might be less prone to militarism (pp. 124–125). Large, capitalized militaries and wars of choice may be a luxury good; demand rises with national income. It is, for example, no coincidence that wealthy democracies tend to invest in unmanned aerial vehicles. ^{Footnote 2}

Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage’s wonderful book (Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe, 2016) shows that progressive taxation rarely emerges, largely due to concerns about fairness, except during wars of mass mobilization. ^{Footnote 3} My book formally assumes a flat tax, but nonetheless explains an ironic aftermath. We live in a world where, due to improving technology, for highly developed states war has become an exercise in fiscal rather than social mobilization. Yet progressive taxation remains. Given the mechanisms that Weeks and I identify in this critical exchange, democratic militarism appears even more overdetermined than I suggested in 2014.