Alternative government leaders seeking to exploit financial crises have two weapons to use in the public sphere. The first is the negative weapon of blame, while the second is the more constructive weapon of policy creation. It is clear from the cases in this chapter that the ability to use these weapons is constrained by the different political systems and political contexts within which opposition leaders operate. Furthermore, it is clear that an opposition leader can exploit a crisis successfully while using only one of these weapons effectively. This was certainly the case for David Cameron, who won his blame-framing contest convincingly but was rather less dominant in the policy-framing contest, either breaking even or winning by default. The implication is that a different British prime minister might have been a tougher challenge for Cameron in this contest.

This research suggests that to win the blame contest does not necessarily require a direct link between an opponent and the crisis itself. The indirect links from John McCain to George W. Bush and from McCain to the neo-liberal ideology were more than enough to give Barack Obama a resounding victory in this contest. Moreover, leaders’ success in the blame contests presented in this study hinged on the ability to hold an opponent responsible for the economic system presently in place. This appeared to be a function of how long an opposing party had been in power in recent years.

The findings of this study suggest many potential avenues of research and this chapter has only begun to open up the field of opposition leadership in crisis situations. A larger study is needed to determine whether its core finding—that in a crisis the blaming contest is politically more productive for oppositions than the policy contest—holds. It would also be valuable to investigate whether it is possible to win the policy contest without already having won the blame contest.

Perhaps the most interesting finding of this research is that party leaders who could take a committed ideological stance against the neo-liberal economic program attempted to do so, and this created a pathway to victory in the policy-framing contest. Parties that were ideologically aligned with the neo-liberal program tended to have great difficulty offering an effective alternative. This led such parties to focus on the third contest, as the Tories did, or suffer the consequences of appearing manipulative, as the SPD will probably do in the September 2009 elections. Although opposition leaders have limited avenues through which to exploit financial crises, they can make political gains, particularly if they can blame their opponents for the downturn and if they can repudiate the orthodox ideology.