Limited war and american political engagement

Prior studies of war and political engagement focus on mass mobilizing, successful conflicts and treat war as a monolithic variable affecting all Americans equally. In this study, we analyze the more limited, less successful conflicts prevalent since 1945, and we examine the influence of disparities in local communities casualty rates on their residents patterns of political engagement. Using both individual- and aggregate-level data, we show that citizens from communities that suffered high casualty rates in the Vietnam and Korean Wars were significantly less politically engaged in each conflict's wake than their peers from low-casualty communities.