There is no denying that our effort has been a limited one in several key respects. In particular, we should note that we studied only three public office-holders per country—those who were most intimately involved in macroeconomic management—and thus possibly failed to register publicly voiced differences and disagreements within the government. We selected only a limited number of speeches per office-holder, not replicating Wood’s (2007) towering effort of studying each and every word they uttered on the crisis, so there is a risk of sampling bias. The speeches we selected here might not have captured the full breadth or all the twists and turns over time in the rhetoric of the leaders involved. We focused exclusively on speech-makers on the government side of politics, thus excluding the voices of non-governing parties and interest groups. We adopted a fairly crude set of measures of assessing media responses, focusing on newspapers, and concentrating on broadsheets at that, for the most part ignoring the electronic media and the tabloids whose reach alone might have made them at least as salient a venue for registering the ‘vox populi’ when it came to the public reception of crisis rhetoric. We looked at public opinion data where available and to provide a contextual backdrop, but we know that caution should be exercised when attributing (changes in) leaders’ approval ratings to a particular speech or action by that leader.

We hope—and expect—that in years to come, others will revisit the ground covered in this study more comprehensively and methodically than we have been able to in the short time frame we imposed on ourselves. It remains to be seen whether such exercises will refute, complement or merely reinforce the conclusions of the case studies and the general observations offered here. For the moment, the obvious limitations of this study will not stop us from leaving the reader with a few final questions and reflections that have emerged from it.

This leads into a larger question: does leader rhetoric matter at all? Allan McConnell’s chapter reminds us that leaders always strive for political and policy success, and rhetoric is one of the tools they employ to achieve it. The question is how powerful a tool it really is. Or, perhaps more sensibly, to wonder whether crises lend themselves well to management by speech. It is hard to deny that there are times when rhetoric—words plus the dramaturgy involved in their delivery—matters a great deal in politics. No one who closely followed the dramatic 2008 US election campaign—overshadowed by the cascading financial crisis shattering its corporate giants—which delivered the United States its first African-American President, Barack Obama, would have failed to register the galvanising effect of his persona and presentation on a crisis-ridden nation desperately looking for new leadership. How powerful, however, was the rhetoric of the leaders studied here in naming, framing and taming the financial crisis? Can leaders speak ‘words that succeed’ even though the economic indicators of the day suggest that their policies are failing (Edelman 1977)?

This question is of interest to those scholars in political science and international relations who argue on either side of the debate between ‘realism’ and ‘constructivism’. This debate comes in many guises and the proponents of the two positions use different labels to describe themselves. The main bone of contention, however, is whether political contests and outcomes are driven first and foremost by the material realities that they purport to shape or by ‘ideas’ (cognitions, beliefs, norms, tacit knowledge, models) that people have in their heads and that exist quite independently of those material realities (Bevir and Rhodes 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2008; Marsh and Furlong 2002; Furlong and Marsh 2007; Marsh 2008).

Our study would be of interest to each side in this debate. As we intimated in the opening section of this final chapter, the brute facts of economic breakdown that were unfolding on a daily basis during most of 2008 and the early months of 2009 greatly constrained the ideational space when it came to answering the question ‘Is something bad the matter?’—as something so obviously was. And consequently, the heads of government, finance ministers and bank governors who initially attempted to do what they normally did when faced with a sluggish economy—talking it up—were forced to stage fairly rapid and significant rhetorical retreats. The leaders who had confidently asserted that their country was better prepared than anywhere else to withstand the temporary turbulence caused by problems in US financial markets (and words to that effect) did not offer a pretty sight. All had to back down from their repeated and emphatic assertions about their own system’s resilience and admit that this crisis was not going to pass them by. They received a hard lesson in the full extent of economic globalisation: along with sharing the benefits of open markets and interdependencies comes a share of negative spill-overs—and little can be done to avoid them. Only in Singapore and Canada did leaders hold out a bit longer—in Canada because the Prime Minister genuinely seemed to believe he knew better and was not convincingly corrected by experts or credible opposition counterparts, and in Singapore because of the lack of opposition. By late 2008, even their staunch optimism had to give way to preparing the public for pain.

There is also much in this study for constructivists to consider. The differences within and between countries on how to combat the crisis were sometimes stark. They were the product of pre-existing beliefs, more so than of material realities or interests. Regardless of how badly their particular country was affected by the downturn, fiscal conservatives and free marketeers blamed misguided regulation and ill-designed bailouts for the escalation of the problems. They consequently advocated a less-constrained market rather than government intervention as the ultimate solution for the crisis. They deplored the level of indebtedness their ideological opposites were getting taxpayers into as a result of the stimulus packages they were proposing. In contrast, ‘neo-Keynesians’ and other advocates of activist government saw this crisis as the perfect bankruptcy of their ideological opponents’ long dominance in political-economic thought and policy. They therefore dubbed the crisis the greatest market failure in modern history and their rhetoric readily adopted the language of government as pivotal regulator and wealth defender.

One of the conventional wisdoms of political science is that in times of crisis, people ‘rally around the flag’. That is, they lend their support to whoever happens to be in charge of the government. The first Gulf War was a classic case in point. American and global public opinion wholeheartedly embraced the White House’s definition of the situation: evil dictator invades harmless, oil-rich neighbour, and it is the duty of the world community to not let him get away with it. The 9/11 attacks in the United States generated pretty much the same response—as the 1982 Argentinean invasion of the Falklands Islands had done within the United Kingdom (Lai and Reiter 2005). The phenomenon has been associated in particular with international security crises, although detailed studies have demonstrated that the strength of the effect is highly variable depending on, among other things, whether the conflict involves real war and the way in which it is reported in key media outlets (Oneal and Bryan 1995). The phenomenon has parallels in the world of natural disasters, where researchers observe the emergence of ‘altruistic communities’ and ‘prosocial behaviour’—people setting aside their daily routines and their political differences to help those affected by the destruction (Dynes 1970:84; Tierney et al. 2001).

Leader rhetoric can help bring about the effect and in return leaders can be important beneficiaries of its occurrence (Schubert et al. 2002). That is why leaders like to ‘securitise’ problems: framing them as threats to core national values and interests (Buzan et al. 1998; Eriksson 2002). Doing so successfully lifts these issues above the fray of day-to-day politics and elevates the leaders in question to key managers of the national interest (rather than spineless, poll-following opportunists).

This being the case, a puzzle presents itself: why did we see so little of this in evidence in the case of the global financial crisis? A striking feature of media and public opinion responses to the leader speeches is how guarded or even overtly critical the majority of them are. This surprised us. Surely a crisis of this magnitude lent itself to securitisation, in that a credible case could have been made that the very foundations of national prosperity were at stake? It is perhaps not so surprising that a fading leader such as Bush, who arguably had already gone ‘one war too far’ in Iraq (McAllister 2006) and whose reputation for crisis management was fatally tarnished in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina fiasco (Preston 2008; Boin et al. forthcoming), could not pull this off—but neither could his much-vaunted successor nor many of the other heads of government studied here. In his October address to the nation, Rudd certainly tried to rally Australians in ‘the economic equivalent of a national security crisis’, but this did not remain a dominant theme. Perhaps it is because economic downturns come without enemies that can be stigmatised and inflated to mobilise support for the government (‘corporate greed’ was tried by almost all leaders, but never really settled in the public’s mind as the prime culprit).

In fact, although they might feel counterintuitive, our impressions are in fact in line with the results of public opinion research that suggests that head-of-government popularity takes a dive when the economy does likewise. The leadership lesson that can be drawn from this appears to be as follows: you might be able to frame your way into popularity during war and disaster, but you cannot frame your way out of unpopularity in a recession (nor should you expect to get the credit for economic booms in the same way that you might for winning wars; cf. Kinder 1981). As Bengt Sundelius reminds us in his chapter, inconvenient or ill-managed crises can drive leaders out of a job and governments out of office.

The ‘quick response’ approach to the social science research of this volume deconstructs a process that is still evolving. In that sense our study is shooting at a moving target. At the time of writing, the majority of polities studied in this volume had not undergone a major post-crisis election. It will be a process worth observing as the rhetoric of blame and reform is likely to be brought to the fore. Political careers and institutional futures will inevitably rely on the result of the continuing political and policy framing contests triggered by the economic downturn. It is too early to tell whether the paradigm shifts or overhauls of current regulatory institutions and practices advocated by some will materialise. A considered answer to one of this volume’s central questions—concerning the success of the meaning-making efforts of these leaders—can be provided only by a subsequent study, conducted when the waves produced by the current crisis have fully settled.

One thing is clear, however: the economic downturn has opened the floodgates of economic orthodoxy and regulatory practices underpinning the political management of the market economy within states and across the international system as a whole. Time will tell who will emerge as the winners and losers among the elites and institutions most closely involved in the framing contests that lie at the heart of the reform struggles that are picking up momentum as this book comes to a close.