"Bread and Peace Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections"

Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr.
Department of Economics, Göteborg University
Box 540, 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden

dhibbs@economics.gu.se

forthcoming in "Public Choice"

Abstract

A simple ³Bread and Peace² model shows that aggregate votes 
for President in postwar elections were determined entirely 
by weighted-average growth of real disposable personal income 
per capita during the incumbent partyıs term and the 
cumulative numbers of American military personnel killed in 
action as a result of U.S. interventions in the Korean and 
Vietnamese civil wars.  The model is subjected to robustness 
tests against twenty-two variations in functional form 
inspired by the extensive literature on presidential voting.  
Not one of these variations adds value to the Bread and Peace 
model or significantly perturbs its coefficients.