How Incumbents Survive Economic Crises: Theory and Evidence from Turkey

Conventional wisdom holds that economic crises such as high inflation reduce public support for incumbents, yet surprisingly, incumbents sometimes retain public approval and even win reelection. How do incumbents maintain public support during economic crises? We argue that incumbents may use two rhetorical strategies. First, incumbent rhetoric can divert attention to sociocultural issues to reduce the salience of a souring economy. Second, incumbent rhetoric can stress relative economic competence by emphasizing the opposition’s incompetence and incumbent’s achievements. We test the effectiveness of these strategies by conducting an ethnographically informed survey experiment with 2,400 citizens before Turkey’s 2023 election, a context of severe inflation. We find that incumbent sociocultural rhetoric failed to shift respondents’ attitudes. By contrast, incumbent economic rhetoric significantly affected respondents’ attitudes and persuaded citizens outside the incumbent’s base in particular. These findings illuminate the surprising resilience of support for incumbents, populist leaders, and competitive authoritarian regimes.