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Partisan Bias in Blame Attribution: When Does it Occur?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2015

Andrew Healy ,
Alexander G. Kuo  and
Neil Malhotra
Andrew Healy
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Alexander G. Kuo
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Neil Malhotra
Affiliation:
Professor, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; e-mail: neilm@stanford.edu
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Abstract

How do citizens attribute blame in the wake of government failure? Does partisanship bias these attributions? While partisan cues may serve as useful guides when citizens are evaluating public policies, those cues are likely to be less informative and more distortionary when evaluating government performance regarding a crisis. We address these questions by examining blame attributions to government appointees for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We implement an experimental design in a nationally representative survey that builds on previous work in two ways: (1) we manipulate party labels for the same officials in a real-world setting by considering appointees who were nominated at different times by presidents of different parties; and (2) we examine how domain relevance moderates partisan bias. We find that partisan bias in attributions is strongest when officials are domain relevant, a finding that has troubling implications for representative democracy.

Keywords

Survey experimentblame attributionpartisan biasmotivated reasoningretrospective votingpublic opinion
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , Winter 2014 , pp. 144 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2015 

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