How citizens ascribe credit and blame for national conditions can have large electoral and policy effects. Yet despite this clear importance, the relationship between issue perceptions and responsibility attributions has not been fully examined. Using national economic conditions and the Iraq War as examples, I propose three distinct types of responsibility attributions based on a citizen’s comparison of current conditions to reference points in the past or expectations for the future. Previous work fails to appreciate how past events shape citizens’ attributions; including both current and former office holders in the response set corrects this oversight and allows for the study of how responsibility is assigned following a governmental transition.
I employ attribution theory and theories of motivated reasoning to individuals’ responsibility attributions based on partisanship and issue perception. I hypothesize that individuals’ desire for consistency between their party identification, issue perception, and responsibility attribution lead them to credit copartisan politicians for perceived successes and blame members of the opposite party for perceived failures.
Using existing data sources, an original survey, and two experimental designs, the results show that individuals can and do differentiate between the three proposed types of responsibility attributions. Respondents frequently engage in motivated reasoning when ascribing responsibility following a governmental transition. The research design also examines the effects of responsibility attributions on important forms of political behavior, along with confirmation of the causal effect of party identification’s impact on responsibility attributions.