Mass Politics in Tough Times: Opinions, Votes and Protest in the Great Recession

The impact of the Great Depression on politics in the 1930s was both transformative and shocking. The role of government in America was forever transformed, and across Europe socialist, communist, and fascist parties saw their support skyrocket. Most famously, the National Socialists seized power in Germany in 1933, setting off a chain of events that led to the greatest conflagration in world history. The recent Great Recession has not been as severe as the Great Recession, but it has been severe enough, producing a half decade of negative and/or slow growth across the advanced industrial world. Yet the response by voters has been extraordinarily muted considering the circumstances. Why is this? In Mass Politics in Tough Times, the eminent political scientists Larry Bartels and Nancy Bermeo have gathered a group of leading scholars to analyze the political responses to the Great Recession in the US, Western Europe, and East-Central Europe. In contrast to works that focus on policy responses to the Recession, they examine how ordinary voters have responded. In almost every country, most voters have not shifted their allegiance to either far left or far right parties. Instead, they've continued to act as they have in more normal times: vote based on their own personal circumstances and punish the incumbents who were on watch when the bad turn occurred regardless of whether they were center-left or center-right. In some countries, electoral trends that existed before the Recession have continued. The US, for instance, saw no real increase in popular support for an expanded welfare state. In fact, the anti-regulatory right, which gained strength before the Recession occurred, experienced a series of victories in Wisconsin after 2008. Interestingly, states that had strong welfare systems have seen the least political realignment. As the contributors show, ordinary voters tend to vote based on their own experiences, and those in expansive welfare states have been buffered from the harshest effects of the Recession. That said, states with weaker welfare systems--e.g., Greece--have seen significant political turmoil. Moreover, there have been a small number of cases of popular radicalization, and the contributors have been able to isolate the cause: when voters can establish a clear and direct connection between the actions of political elites and economic hardship, they will throw their support to protest parties on the right and left. Ultimately, though, the picture is one of relatively stoic acceptance of the downturn by the majority of publics. Featuring an impressive range of cases, this will stand as the most comprehensive scholarly account of the Great Recession's impact on political behavior in advanced economies. Available in OSO: Contributors to this volume - Christopher J. Anderson is professor of government at Cornell University. His research focuses on inequality and legitimacy in the European Union and the OECD countries. He has written on such issues as the popularity of governments, the legitimacy of political institutions, and the link between welfare states and citizen behavior. Larry M. Bartels holds the May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. He has written extensively on public opinion, electoral politics, and American democracy, including Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age and Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice. Mark R. Beissinger is the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics at Princeton University and director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS). His main fields of research have been protest movements, nationalism, and revolutions, with special reference to the former Soviet Union and the post-communist states. Nancy Bermeo is the Nuffield Professor of Comparative Politics at Oxford University. She writes on regime change, institutional design, and the effects of systemic shocks on political behavior and institutions. Her publications include Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Role of the Citizenry in the Breakdown of Democracy and, most recently, Coping with Crisis: Government Reactions to the Great Recession (ed. with Jonas Pontusson). Katherine J. Cramer is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on public opinion, political communication, civic engagement, and deliberative democracy. She is the author of Talking About Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference and Talking About Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life and coauthor of Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Have Undermined Citizenship and What We Can Do About It. Rafaela Dancygier is assistant professor in the department of politics and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Her broad research interests are in comparative politics, with a focus on the implications of ethnic diversity in advanced democracies. Her work has examined the domestic consequences of international immigration, the political incorporation and electoral representation of immigrant-origin minorities, and the determinants of ethnic conflict. It has been published in her book Immigration and Conflict in Europe, in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Comparative Politics, World Politics, and in edited volumes. Michael Donnelly is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. He received his Ph.D. in politics and social policy from Princeton University in 2013. He studies comparative political behavior, European politics, and quantitative methods, focusing on issues at the intersection of group identities and political economy. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled "Identity and Interests: Voter Heuristics and Support for Redistributive Policies." His research has appeared in the Journal of Politics. Raymond M. Duch is an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, where he directs the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS). He is the coauthor of The Economic Vote: How Political and Economic Institutions Condition the Economic Vote, which demonstrates, from analysis of more than three hundred public opinion surveys, how citizens hold political parties accountable for economic outcomes. More recently, Duch has turned to experiments in order to identify the information shortcuts that individuals deploy for attributing responsibility for collective decision making, such as those made in multiparty governing coalition governments. Jason D. Hecht is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Cornell University and was a Visiting Scholar in Politics at the University of Oxford from 2012 to 2013. His dissertation explores how the onset of recessions affects public concern for income inequality in Europe and the United States. More broadly, his research investigates how economic, political, and social contexts shape individuals' behavior and attitudes. Sara B. Hobolt is Professor and Sutherland Chair in European Institutions at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has previously held posts at the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan and has published extensively on public opinion, elections, and European Union politics. Her book Europe in Question: Referendums on European Integration (Oxford University Press, 2009) was awarded the Best Book prize by the European Union Studies Association. Hanspeter Kriesi currently holds the Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute in Florence. He previously taught at the universities of Amsterdam, Geneva, and Zurich. His wide-ranging research interests include the study of direct democracy, social movements, political parties, interest groups, public opinion, the public sphere, and the media. He was the director of a Swiss national research program, Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century, from 2005 to 2012. Patrick Leblond is associate professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa as well as research associate at CIRANO (Montreal). He has published extensively on financial and monetary integration, banking regulation, international trade, and business-government relations. Prior to moving to Ottawa, he taught international business at HEC Montreal and worked in accounting and business consulting. Nonna Mayer is research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France and also works at the Centre D'etudes Europeennes of Sciences Po, Paris. Her fields of expertise are electoral sociology, racism, anti-Semitism, and political participation. Her current research (Votpauvr/Poor people votes) explores the electoral impact of social precariousness in a context of crisis. Inaki Sagarzazu is a lecturer in comparative politics at the University of Glasgow. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Houston and was a postdoctoral researcher at Nuffield College in the University of Oxford. His research mainly focuses on how parties communicate with voters and how voters perceive these messages. His work has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Latin American Politics and Society, and European Union Politics. Gwendolyn Sasse is a Professorial Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, and University Reader in the Department of Politics and International Relations and the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford. Her research interests include post-communist transitions, comparative democratization, ethnic conflict, and the political behavior of migrants. Her most recent book, The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict, won the Alexander Nove Prize awarded by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. Stuart Soroka is associate professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal. He is a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, and a co-investigator of the Canadian Election Study. Much of his work focuses on the sources and/or structure of public preferences for policy, and on the relationships between public policy, public opinion, and mass media. His most recent books include Degrees of Democracy: Politics, Public Opinion and Policy (with Christopher Wlezien) and Negativity in Democratic Policy: Causes and Consequences (forthcoming). Katherine Cramer Walsh is Christopher Wlezien is Hogg Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published widely on elections, public opinion, and public policy, and her books include Degrees of Democracy, Who Gets Represented? and The Timeline of Presidential Elections. Shee was founding co-editor of the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties and currently is associate editor of Public Opinion Quarterly and Parliamentary Affairs.