It is a commonplace that the recession triggered by the global financial crisis of 2007–8 was the biggest economic contraction experienced by the industrialized core of the world economy since the 1930s. Yet, with neoliberal reforms, fiscal austerity, and populist discontent dating back to the 1990s, early scholarship struggled to identify new political dynamics that might be attributed to the Great Recession. With the benefit of hindsight, the authors of Democracy under Siege? argue that the Great Recession has had more important consequences for mass politics in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries than commonly recognized.

Applying the comparative method in exemplary fashion, the authors explore the impact of the Great Recession by looking for cross-national variation in economic recovery rates and debt levels over the period 2010–17, as well as cross-national variation in the magnitude of economic shocks during the crisis. Their empirical analyses cover a wide range of attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Separate chapters are devoted to subjective perceptions of economic insecurity, support for public spending on health care and unemployment compensation, turnout in national elections, voting for incumbent parties, and, finally, vote choice among broadly defined party families (focusing on support for Left parties and support for “challenger parties”).

Each empirical chapter presents macro-level analyses of data for all OECD countries over the period 1990–2017, followed by individual-level analyses based on harmonized postelection survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). While the chapters on economic insecurity and policy preferences draw on tailored survey items from CSES Module 4 (26 postelection surveys in the first half of the 2010s), the chapters on turnout and vote choice draw on some 100 post-election surveys in 24 countries over the period 1996–2017. Controlling for individual-level control variables, the multivariate analyses of survey data focus on the effects of macro-level variables—not only gross domestic product (GDP) per-capita growth and debt in percent of GDP but also three measures designed to capture how governments and political parties responded to the Great Recession and the recovery strategies they pursued: the fiscal policy stance of governments (the cyclically adjusted fiscal balance in percent of GDP), relative redistribution (the percentage change in the Gini coefficient brought about by taxes and transfers), and the emphasis on welfare-state provisions in party manifestos. Seeking to identify period-specific effects, the authors interact these macro variables with dummies for precrisis, crisis, and postcrisis elections. They also estimate models with three-way interactions, involving two macro variables plus period dummies. As the authors put it, the results presented in the book “paint a complex picture” (p. 184).

One of the most striking results reported by the authors is that GDP performance did not have any effect on people’s propensity to vote for incumbent parties during the Great Recession, but it was a hugely significant predictor of support for incumbent parties in the postcrisis period. The authors argue that “economic performance becomes less informative as a basis to assess incumbent competence when the economy is doing poorly everywhere,” suggesting that voters punished incumbents for slow recovery rates, relative to other countries, in the 2010s (p. 144). This sounds eminently plausible, but is it a claim about the long-term consequences of the Great Recession, as the framing of the book seems to imply? Or is it an argument about the extraordinary character of international crises? Though economic voting appears to have been less prominent, the authors show that GDP performance was also a significant predictor of support for incumbent parties in the precrisis period.

Democracy under Siege? cries out for a more extended discussion of exactly what happened during the crisis of 2008–9 (or its immediate aftermath) that might account for the rise of economic voting and other dynamics that distinguish the postcrisis period from the precrisis period. Side-stepping this challenge, the authors feature “the idea of strategic parties” (p. 16) or, in a slightly different formulation, the idea that “politically salient social divisions can be politically constructed” (p. 190) as their main contribution to the literature on comparative political economy and mass politics in advanced capitalist countries. In their own summary, the book shows that “the crisis, as gauged by timing of elections and per capita growth rates, affected mass politics … [but] these effects were usually filtered through parties’ policy and rhetorical responses” (p. 188).

The authors demonstrate that the crisis generated less insecurity in countries with more redistributive tax-transfer systems and also show that redistribution offset the negative effects of slow economic growth on electoral participation. These results make intuitive sense, but I am not convinced they tell us much about the strategic behavior of political elites, as distinct from the effects of long-standing policy legacies. I am also unsure about what to make of the authors’ finding that an emphasis in party platforms on the need to maintain or improve unemployment benefits led to an increase in support for public spending on the unemployed during the Great Recession. Couldn’t the causal arrows just as well go in the opposite direction? Regarding support for Left parties, the analysis of the interaction between growth rates and welfare rhetoric yields significant but puzzling results: Both before and during the crisis, economic growth seems to have boosted support for Left parties with strong welfare commitments, but the opposite relationship holds for the postcrisis period.

Yet another empirical finding featured by the authors is that the effects of fiscal policy stance on support for incumbent parties depends on economic growth: Especially in the postcrisis period, governments pursuing expansionary fiscal policies have fared well when economic growth has been strong and no better than “austerian” governments when growth has been weak. To my mind, this observation raises the important question of what constrains “constrained partisanship” (a term that the authors borrow from the 2015 volume edited by Beramendi, Häusermann, Kitschelt, and Kriesi). Some of authors’ formulations seem premised on the idea that fiscal stimulus is a growth-enhancing policy that any government could pursue if it so wished. An alternative view would be that the growth-enhancing effects of fiscal stimulus vary across capitalist economies. In the former case, we badly need a political explanation of why so many governments opted for austerity in the wake of the Great Recession; in the latter case, we need to take “varieties of capitalism” or “growth models” into account.

I do not wish to contest the top-down approach to mass politics advocated by the authors. Before I read their book, I was convinced that “what parties do makes a difference” (p. 198) and, having read it, I am even more convinced. Still, I would have liked to hear more from the authors on why parties (and governments) do what they do and, more directly pertinent to their project, how policy choices and elite rhetoric explain the differences in causal dynamics between precrisis and postcrisis mass politics. Notwithstanding these criticisms, scholars will find much to learn from this book.