War has diverse and seemingly contradictory effects on liberal democratic institutions and processes. It has led democracies to abandon their principles, expanding executive authority and restricting civil liberties, but it has also prompted the development of representative parliamentary institutions. It has undercut socioeconomic reform, but it has also laid the basis for the modern welfare state. This landmark volume brings together distinguished political scientists, historians, and sociologists to explore the impact of war on liberal democracy - a subject far less studied than the causes of war but hardly less important. Three questions drive the analysis: How does war shape the transition to and durability of democracy? How does war influence democratic contestation? How does war transform democratic participation? Employing a wide range of methods, this volume assesses what follows in the wake of war.
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Contemporaries and historians have often blamed the errors and tragedies of US policy during the Cold War on the “Cold War consensus.” Its usual periodization, according to which it came together by around 1948 and persisted until the late 1960s when it unraveled amidst the trauma of the Vietnam War, fits well with a common theory of change in ideas and discourse. That theory expects stasis until a substantial unexpected failure (in this domain, military defeat) discredits dominant ideas and unsettles dominant coalitions. But the Cold War consensus has never been systematically studied. This article does so for the first time via a large-scale content analysis of foreign affairs editorials. By this measure, the consensus did not coalesce until well into the 1950s and began to erode even before the Americanization of the Vietnam War in 1965. To make sense of this puzzle, I argue that the theoretical conventional wisdom is inadequate when it comes to the dominant public narratives that underpin and structure debate over national security. I argue that the politics of protracted military failure impede change in these dominant narratives, while victory generates political space for unorthodox ideas to penetrate. Process-tracing reveals causal dynamics consistent with my theory highlighting the domestic politics of the military and diplomatic battlefield: failure in the Korean War, which might have undermined Cold War globalism, instead facilitated the Cold War narrative’s rise to dominance (or consensus); and the triumph of the Cuban Missile Crisis made possible that dominant narrative’s breakdown before the upheaval of Vietnam. This hard and important case suggests the need to rethink the relationship between success, failure, and change in dominant narratives of national security—and perhaps in other policy domains as well.
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Studying social narratives is not part of mainstream political science, but, as Shaul Shenhav argues in Analyzing Social Narratives, it ought to be. Narratives are everywhere and are an important factor in human and social life; human beings are essentially homo narrans, and so social science must take narratives seriously. Narratology is just one of many interpretivist methods that are gaining increasing ground within the social sciences. Shenhav provides an introduction to the study of social narratives, while also contributing to the theoretical development of the field himself through notions such as multiplicity (referring to the proliferation of narratives through repetition and variation) and story-listening (referring to the way in which the researcher interacts with stories). In this review symposium, Ronald R. Krebs, Michael D. Jones, Myron J. Aronoff and Shaul Shenhav discuss Shenhav’s book and, beyond that, the advantages of taking social narratives seriously.
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