Economic policies have supposedly become more salient for voters during the economic crisis due to an intensified discussion in the media and the immediate effects on many citizens’ lives. We can thus expect economic considerations to play a more important role in voting decisions. But not all parties will react to the same degree to this increased salience of economic attitudes. We suggest that two interacting factors will influence the extent to which parties emphasize or de-emphasize macroeconomic policies: the impact of the crisis, and the parties’ governing status. Their behavior in turn has severe consequences for the degree of responsiveness which we hypothesize to have suffered during the crisis, in particular in countries severely affected by the crisis and for incumbent parties.
We focus on issue saliency congruence, a prerequisite of policy responsiveness, and draw on several cross-national surveys to investigate the topic (CMP/ CHES and CSES/EES) and on two time points (before and during the crisis). Our findings show that indeed during the crisis responsiveness decreased sharply but with the expected variation.
