Bread and Peace voting in U.S. presidential elections

Abstract

A simple "Bread and Peace" 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 party's term and the cumulative numbers of American military personnel killed in action as a result of U.S. intervention 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.