War casualties and US presidential popularity: A comparison of the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq war

Benny Geys

Discussion Papers, Research Professorship & Project "The Future of Fiscal Federalism" from WZB Berlin Social Science Center

Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that war casualties depress incumbent popularity. We argue that the strength and even the direction of these effects is inherently context-dependent because the perception of casualties varies over time and space, affected by historical developments. While intuitive, this proposition has as yet not been directly addressed due to a lack of explicitly comparative analyses. Investigating US presidential popularity over the period 1948-2006, the present paper illustrates that intensity and occurrence of casualty effects on presidential popularity varies significantly across the three considered military conflicts (i.e. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq). Moreover, these differences can be credibly linked to historical developments.

Keywords: Presidential approval; popularity function; war; casualties; historical institutionalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/54591/1/682397814.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:wzbfff:spii201005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers, Research Professorship & Project "The Future of Fiscal Federalism" from WZB Berlin Social Science Center Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().