War deaths increase local Conservative support

Daniel Rubenson and I presented the latest version of our paper on war deaths and Conservative candidate support. The basic story is that in 2008, Conservative candidates did better in constituencies that had experienced a war death. The abstract is here: 

War comes with terrible costs both in terms of money and lives. Do voters punish incumbents for theses costs? Much of the existing literature on the effects of war deaths on public opinion toward incumbents and their war efforts suggests that the answer is yes. We test this proposition on data from a non-US case: Canada's war in Afghanistan. We estimate models of the effect of local war deaths on government candidate support using both individual level panel data from the 2006 and 2008 Canadian Election Study and aggregate district level data. In none of our models do we find support for the conclusion that war deaths decrease support for candidates of the governing party. Instead we find strong evidence at both the individual and district levels that support for Conservative Party candidates is higher in districts that experienced war deaths.

The paper is here. And a nice article about it in the Toronto Star is here!