Will a downturn help or hinder Brown?

Although they look at it from different angles, I think that James Forsyth and Daniel Finkelstein have both identified one of the most interesting political questions of 2008 – will an economic downturn boost or deflate support for Brown’s Government? Contrary to James, Finkelstein claims in an article today that the gathering economic storm-clouds will be good news for the Prime Minister:

“The understanding that global forces are at work helps the government rather than hinders it.  The refusal to credit politicians turns into a reluctance to blame them.  Most polls seem to suggest that voters will not regard this Government as responsible for the downturn ….  A global downturn also brings into a play one of the strongest forces in human affairs – risk aversion.  A fashionable area of economic research is the exploration of the way that people make decisions under uncertainty.  Repeated experiments demonstrate our reluctance to accept a bargain with an uncertain payoff rather than another bargain with a more certain, but possibly lower, expected payoff.