Hang on, Doug, I'm not quite ready to 'put this one away'. A little unpacking would be good here.
* Are you against the hope that with crisis, hegemonic power declines and financial circuits of capital wane? That, to me, is the merit of capitalist crisis joined by progressive reregulation, e.g. the demise of the Gold Standard, Glass-Steagall, the New Deal. (Right now it looks like we're getting the former - US empire shrinkage - and bankster re-empowerment due to the lack of strong US grassroots resistance, aside from Public Citizen.)
* Are you against the role that regular, repeated, system-threatening capitalist crisis plays in left critiques of capitalism? Whyever so (aside from your own incompetence in not foreseeing the 2008 burst)?
* Are you of the mistaken impression that 'voting communist' represents any sort of marker of anything? Would you share the updated paper so we can figure out what you and the author mean by 'far left parties'? Why would anyone imagine that 'far left parties' adding 1 or 3 or 5% of the vote (e.g. as Die Linke have) make any sort of difference? Do you not want to ask whether a new zeitgeist - e.g. the Global Justice movement's rise in places like Seattle, Asia, South Africa and Latin America following the 1998 meltdown - might be worthy of consideration? (Ok, hard to add subjectivities into a regression, so maybe just forget it then.)
Anyhow, this post is surprisingly unrigorous and uncomradely of you, comrade Doug...
Cheers, Patrick
"The original paper said nothing about far left parties, so I wrote the authors to ask them if they’d looked into that angle. Grüner responded by sending an updated version of the paper that did. (It’s not up on the web yet, but should be very soon. I’ll post the link here when it is.) They find no significant effect of a growth slowdown on the vote share of communist parties. Brückner and Grüner speculate that a major selling point of far-right parties is “nontraditional” redistribution—not so much from rich to poor, but away from ethnic, occupational, or regional minorities. They don’t say why the appeal of “traditional” redistribution—from rich to poor—might not reflect the business cycle. Whatever the reason, recessions are not good for the left and are good for the right. A major exception, of course, was the U.S. in the 1930s, but that one took the unemployment rate up to 25%. And that Great Depression didn’t do much for the left in Europe. So please, let’s put this one away and stop hoping for the worst."