Politics do matter, but does unemployment?

Abstract

Abstract Contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the 1950s and 1960s, conservative governments in the 1980s have not been punished by the electorate for rising or enduring mass unemployment. Part of the explanation for this can be found in the specific content and functioning of ideological discourse regarding unemployment. This article develops the idea that parties’ electoral strategies can be seen as forms of ideological interpellations. In the empirical part of the article we show that by their ideological discourse government parties succeed in mitigating and making acceptable the unemployment problem.