In the last half-century, the international shift toward economic liberalization and globalization increasingly yoked national economic conditions to global trends. At the same time, advances in communication technology gave political leaders the opportunity to reach their constituents more quickly and easily than ever before. Paradoxically, as governments lost the power to effect short-term economic change at home, social scientists increasingly linked economic performance to election outcomes. And as candidates harnessed the power to spread their messages widely, the apparent ubiquity of economic voting implied that candidates were hamstrung by economic context. Regardless of the choices they made during the campaign, voters would inevitably take governments to task for the state of the economy.

Despite the rise of the economic voting paradigm, candidates and their advisors stake their livelihoods on the conviction that their electoral fortunes depend in large part on finding the right message regardless of economic context. Campaigns expend vast amounts of time and money making choices about what to say and how often to say it. Of course, some messages fall flat. When things go wrong, however, candidates redouble their faith in the power of rhetoric rather than relinquish their fate to the deterministic logic of extant economic voting theory.

In support of this belief, cognitive-psychological research on “priming” has long suggested that candidates need not be victims of the economic vote. Priming theory holds that more accessible considerations weigh more heavily on evaluations of elected officials. Quite simply, if voters haven't been thinking about the economy they won't vote on the economy. Moreover, candidates, through their calculated decisions about what issues to emphasize during the campaign, can make certain considerations more accessible in the minds of voters (activation) and others less accessible (deactivation). Against the predictions of economic voting theory, this implies that candidates' emphasis on economic issues profoundly affects voters' propensity to hold incumbent-party candidates responsible for their economic stewardship.

This book sought to resolve this fundamental disagreement between those who practice campaigns and those who study them by evaluating a campaign-centered model of economic voting rooted in priming theory against the conventional model. Does exposure to economic campaign messages condition the strength of the economic vote?