Prof. Shen’s Research on Inequality and War Cited in London Review of Books

Professor Francis Shen’s research on inequality, American military casualties, and the 2016 election of Donald Trump was quoted in a London Review of Books essay by Jackson Lears. Shen’s study, co-authored with Professor Douglas Kriner of Boston University, showed that even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump. Shen and Kriner’s model suggests that if three states key to Trump’s victory—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House.