Political Effects of the Great Recession

Abstract

America’s political response to the Great Recession was surprising to pundits but mostly consistent with patterns familiar to political scientists. Ordinary citizens assessed politicians and policies primarily on the basis of visible evidence of success or failure. Thus, in 2008, the president’s party was punished at the polls for the dismal state of the election-year economy. The successful challenger, Barack Obama, pushed policy significantly to the Left, as Democratic presidents typically do, provoking a predictable “thermostatic” shift to the Right in the public’s policy mood. In 2010, slow economic recovery and public qualms about ideological overreach exacerbated the losses normally suffered by a president’s party in midterm elections. In 2012, Obama was reelected—as incumbents almost always are when their party has held the White House for just four years—thanks in part to a modest but timely upturn in the income growth rate.