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Wars have been underexamined as causal factors in American political history. The nation's freestanding hot wars seem to have generated at least four kinds of major effects: policy changes of lasting consequence, new issue regimes, durable changes in electoral alignments, and durable changes in party ideologies. Considered here are the War of 1812, the War with Mexico, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.
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David R. Mayhew (2005) studied this question.
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