ABSTRACT
How the Great Recession unfolded in Iceland represents an ideal case to study the effects of economic crises on the policy preferences of the mass public. Its size and abruptness had every potential to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions about fundamental political issues, and as such, can be considered a most likely case for preference change. In this chapter, we consider attitudes towards two major issues areas that were greatly affected by the crisis—the role of the state in the economy and Iceland’s relations to the external world. Based on the measures we construct for issue preferences and using multiple regression analysis, we find evidence that Icelandic voters became somewhat more averse to both market liberalism and internationalism, shifting in the direction of preferences for more state intervention and isolationism. In exploring differences in the preferences of socio-economic groups, we find that the relative preferences of different groups mostly moved in parallel over the crisis years, suggesting that the crisis did not have an overall polarising effect on the public.
